Phaeton (alternatively Phaethon or Phaëton ; from , ) is a hypothetical planet hypothesized by the Titius–Bode law to have existed between the

orbit In celestial mechanics, an orbit (also known as orbital revolution) is the curved trajectory of an object such as the trajectory of a planet around a star, or of a natural satellite around a planet, or of an artificial satellite around an ...

s of

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. It is also known as the "Red Planet", because of its orange-red appearance. Mars is a desert-like rocky planet with a tenuous carbon dioxide () atmosphere. At the average surface level the atmosph ...

and

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...

, the destruction of which supposedly led to the formation of the

asteroid belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids ...

(including the

dwarf planet A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit around the Sun, massive enough to be hydrostatic equilibrium, gravitationally rounded, but insufficient to achieve clearing the neighbourhood, orbital dominance like the ...

Ceres). The hypothetical planet was named for

Phaethon Phaethon (; , ), also spelled Phaëthon, is the son of the Oceanids, Oceanid Clymene (mother of Phaethon), Clymene and the solar deity, sun god Helios in Greek mythology. According to most authors, Phaethon is the son of Helios who, out of a de ...

, the son of the sun god

Helios In ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology, Helios (; ; Homeric Greek: ) is the god who personification, personifies the Sun. His name is also Latinized as Helius, and he is often given the epithets Hyperion ("the one above") an ...

Greek mythology Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of ancient Greek folklore, today absorbed alongside Roman mythology into the broader designation of classical mythology. These stories conc ...

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

Zeus Zeus (, ) is the chief deity of the List of Greek deities, Greek pantheon. He is a sky father, sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology, who rules as king of the gods on Mount Olympus. Zeus is the child ...

Phaeton hypothesis

''Sturz des Phaeton'' (Fall of the Phaeton) by Johann Michael Franz upHeinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers, who formulated the planet Phaeton hypothesis According to the hypothesized Titius–Bode law proposed in the 1700s to explain the spacing of planets in a solar system, a planet may have once existed between Mars and Jupiter. After learning of the regular sequence discovered by the German astronomer and mathematician Johann Daniel Titius, astronomer Johann E. Bode urged a search for the fifth planet corresponding to a gap in the sequence. (1) Ceres, the largest

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

in the asteroid belt (now considered a

), was serendipitously discovered in 1801 by the Italian Giuseppe Piazzi and found to closely match the "empty" position in Titius' sequence, which led many to believe it to be the "missing planet". However, in 1802

astronomer An astronomer is a scientist in the field of astronomy who focuses on a specific question or field outside the scope of Earth. Astronomers observe astronomical objects, such as stars, planets, natural satellite, moons, comets and galaxy, galax ...

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers discovered and named the asteroid (2) Pallas, a second object in roughly the same orbit as (1) Ceres. Olbers proposed that these two discoveries were the fragments of a disrupted planet that had formerly orbited the Sun, and predicted that more of these pieces would be found. The discovery of the asteroid (3) Juno by

Karl Ludwig Harding Karl Ludwig Harding (29 September 1765 – 31 August 1834) was a German astronomer, who discovered 3 Juno, Juno, the third asteroid of the main-belt in 1804. Life and career Harding was born in Lauenburg. From 1786–1789, he was educated a ...

and (4) Vesta by Olbers, buttressed his hypothesis. In 1823, German linguist and retired teacher called Olbers' destroyed planet ''Phaëthon'', linking it to the Greek myths and legends about

and others. In 1927, Franz Xaver Kugler wrote a short book titled ''Sibyllinischer Sternkampf und Phaëthon in naturgeschichtlicher Beleuchtung'' (The Sybilline Battle of the Stars and Phaeton Seen as Natural History). The central idea in Kugler's book is that the myth of Phaethon was based on a real event: Making use of ancient sources, Kugler argued that Phaeton had been a very bright celestial object that appeared around 1500 BC which fell to Earth not long afterwards as a shower of large meteorites, causing catastrophic fires and floods in Africa and elsewhere. Hypotheses regarding the formation of the asteroid belt from the destruction of a hypothetical fifth planet are today collectively referred to as " the disruption theory". These hypotheses state that there was once a major planetary member of the

Solar System The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Sola ...

circulating in the present gap between Mars and Jupiter, which was destroyed by one or more of the following hypothetical processes: * it veered too close to Jupiter and was torn apart by its powerful tides * it was struck by another large celestial body * it was destroyed by a hypothetical

brown dwarf Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that have more mass than the biggest gas giant planets, but less than the least massive main sequence, main-sequence stars. Their mass is approximately 13 to 80 Jupiter mass, times that of Jupiter ()not big en ...

, the companion star to the

Sun The Sun is the star at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive, nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light a ...

, known as

Nemesis In ancient Greek religion and myth, Nemesis (; ) also called Rhamnousia (or Rhamnusia; ), was the goddess who personified retribution for the sin of hubris: arrogance before the gods. Etymology The name ''Nemesis'' is derived from the Greek ...

* it was shattered by some internal catastrophe Phateon4wikipedia

In 1953, Soviet Russian astronomer Ivan I. Putilin suggested that Phaeton was destroyed due to

centrifugal force Centrifugal force is a fictitious force in Newtonian mechanics (also called an "inertial" or "pseudo" force) that appears to act on all objects when viewed in a rotating frame of reference. It appears to be directed radially away from the axi ...

s, giving it a diameter of approximately (slightly larger than Mars' diameter of ) and a rotational speed of 2.6 hours. Eventually, the planet became so distorted that parts of it near its equator were spun off into space.

Outgassing Outgassing (sometimes called offgassing, particularly when in reference to indoor air quality) is the release of a gas that was dissolved, trapped, frozen, or absorbed in some material. Outgassing can include sublimation and evaporation (whic ...

of gases once stored in Phaeton's interior caused multiple explosions, sending material into space and forming asteroid families. However, his hypothesis was not widely accepted. Two years later in 1955,

Odesa Odesa, also spelled Odessa, is the third most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern ...

n astronomer Konstantin N. Savchenko suggested that Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta were not fragments of Phaeton, but rather its former moons. Phaeton had an additional fifth satellite, assumed to be the size of Ceres, orbiting near the planet's

Hill sphere The Hill sphere is a common model for the calculation of a Sphere of influence (astrodynamics), gravitational sphere of influence. It is the most commonly used model to calculate the spatial extent of gravitational influence of an astronomical ...

, and thus more subject to gravitational perturbations from Jupiter. As a result, the fifth satellite became tidally detached and orbited the Sun for millions of years afterward, making periodic close misses with Phaeton that slowly increased its velocity. Once the escaped satellite re-entered Phaeton's Hill sphere, it collided with the planet at high speed, shattering it while Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta assumed heliocentric orbits. Simulations showed that for such a Ceres-sized body to shatter Phaeton, it would need to be travelling at nearly . The disrupted planet hypothesis was also supported by French–Italian mathematician and astronomer

Joseph-Louis Lagrange Joseph-Louis Lagrange (born Giuseppe Luigi LagrangiaReginald Daly in 1943; American geochemists Harrison Brown and Clair Patterson in 1948; Soviet academics Alexander Zavaritskiy in 1948, Vasily Fesenkov in 1950 (who later rejected his own model) and Otto Schmidt (died 1956); British–Canadian astronomer Michael Ovenden in 1972–1973; and American astronomer Donald Menzel (1901–1976) in 1978. Ovenden suggested that the planet be named "

Krypton Krypton (from 'the hidden one') is a chemical element; it has symbol (chemistry), symbol Kr and atomic number 36. It is a colorless, odorless noble gas that occurs in trace element, trace amounts in the Earth's atmosphere, atmosphere and is of ...

" after the destroyed native world of

Superman Superman is a superhero created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, which first appeared in the comic book ''Action Comics'' Action Comics 1, #1, published in the United States on April 18, 1938.The copyright date of ''Action Comics ...

, as well as believing it to have been a

gas giant A gas giant is a giant planet composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants of the Solar System. The term "gas giant" was originally synonymous with "giant planet". However, in the 1990s, it became known that Uranu ...

roughly eighty-five to ninety

Earth mass An Earth mass (denoted as ''M''🜨, ''M''♁ or ''M''E, where 🜨 and ♁ are the astronomical symbols for Earth), is a unit of mass equal to the mass of the planet Earth. The current best estimate for the mass of Earth is , with a relative ...

es in mass and nearly the size of

Saturn Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest in the Solar System, after Jupiter. It is a gas giant, with an average radius of about 9 times that of Earth. It has an eighth the average density of Earth, but is over 95 tim ...

. Today, the Phaeton hypothesis has been superseded by the accretion model. Most astronomers today believe that the asteroids in the main belt are remnants of the

protoplanetary disk A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disc of dense gas and dust surrounding a young newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star. The protoplanetary disk may not be considered an accretion disk; while the two are sim ...

that never formed a planet and that in this region the amalgamation of protoplanets into a planet was prevented by the disruptive gravitational perturbations of Jupiter during the formative period of the

Other hypotheses

Some scientists and non-scientists continue to advocate for the existence and destruction of a Phaeton-like planet. Zecharia Sitchin suggested that the goddess known to the Sumerians as

Tiamat In Mesopotamian religion, Tiamat ( or , ) is the primordial sea, mating with Abzû (Apsu), the groundwater, to produce the gods in the Babylonian epic '' Enûma Elish'', which translates as "when on high". She is referred to as a woman, an ...

in fact relates to a planet that was destroyed by a rogue planet known as Nibiru, creating both Earth and the asteroid belt. His work is widely regarded as

pseudoscience Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable cl ...

. The astronomer and author Tom Van Flandern held that Phaeton (which he called "Planet V", with V representing the Roman numeral for five and not to be confused with the other postulated former fifth planet not attributed to the formation of the asteroid belt) exploded through some internal mechanism. In his "Exploded Planet Hypothesis 2000", he lists possible reasons for its explosion: a runaway nuclear reaction of uranium in its core, a change of state as the planet cooled down creating a density phase change, or through continual absorption of heat in the core from

graviton In theories of quantum gravity, the graviton is the hypothetical elementary particle that mediates the force of gravitational interaction. There is no complete quantum field theory of gravitons due to an outstanding mathematical problem with re ...

s. Van Flandern even suggested that Mars itself may have been a moon of Planet V, due to its craters hinting to exposure to meteorite storms and its relatively low density compared to the other inner planets. In 1972, Soyuzmultfilm studios produced an animated

short film A short film is a film with a low running time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of not more than 40 minutes including all credits". Other film o ...

titled ''Phaeton: The Son of Sun'' (), directed by Vasiliy Livanov, in which the asteroid belt is portrayed as the remains of a planet. The film also has numerous references to ancient astronauts.

In fiction

The hypothetical former fifth planet has been referenced in fiction since at least the late 1800s. In

science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...

, the planet is often called "Bodia" after Johann Elert Bode. By the pulp era of science fiction, Bodia was a recurring theme. In these stories it is typically similar to Earth and inhabited by humans, often advanced humans and occasionally the ancestors of humans on Earth. Following the invention of the

atomic bomb A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission or atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear weapon), producing a nuclear expl ...

in 1945, stories of this planetary destruction became increasingly common, encouraged by the advent of a plausible-seeming means of disintegration. Several works of the 1950s used the idea to warn of the dangers of nuclear weapons. The concept has since largely been relegated to deliberately retro works.

References

Sources

* * * * * , Records of meetings 1808–1916 in v. 11–27, p. 872.

External links