- 2. Basic Concepts of Chemistry: Chemical Evolution of Matter

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satellites by some primary cause.
Subsequently new members of the Solar System were discovered. We now know that,
although most satellites revolve in the same direction as the planets and the direction in which
the Sun rotates, nevertheless the moons of Uranus revolve in a plane almost
perpendicular to the orbital plane of their planet, and three of Jupiter's eleven moons
and one of Saturn's nine moons, and one more moon of Neptune, revolve in the opposite
direction. These facts contradict the basic tenet of Laplace's theory, that a
rotating nebula could not give rise to satellites revolving in different
directions.
According to the tidal theory the direction of motion of the planets was imparted by
a passing star: it passed in the plane in which the planets now revolve,
and in a direction that predetermined their revolution from west to east. But
why, then, do the satellites of Uranus revolve perpendicular to this plane, and
some moons of Jupiter and Saturn revolve in the opposite direction? The tidal
theory is unable to explain this.
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According to all existing theories, the angular velocity of a satellite's revolution should
be lower than the rotation rate of its parent body. But the inner satellite of Mars
revolves faster than Mars itself.
Certain difficulties confront the nebular and tidal theories,
and also another theory, proposed quite recently. According to it, the Sun
was formerly part of a system of two stars. A third star passing by shattered the Sun's
companion, and the planets arose from its fragments. This theory claims that the large
planets were fused together from fragments, while the smaller, so-called "terrestrial" planets
formed from chips broken off the giant planets.
The proposition that the smaller, solid planets were born from the
larger, gaseous ones was advanced to explain the difference in the ratio
of weight to volume between large and small planets, but this theory is unable to explain
the existing difference between the specific gravity of the small planets and their satellites. By
splitting off, the Earth gave birth to the Moon; but since the specific gravity of the Moon is greater than the specific
gravity of the large planets and less than that of the Earth, it would be far more reasonable, by the logic
of this theory, to suppose that it was the Moon, despite its smallness, that gave birth to the Earth,
and not the other way around. And this makes us doubt the argument put forward.
The question of the origin of the planets and their satellites remains unresolved. The theories
not only contradict one another; each of them carries contradictions within itself.
"If no planets revolved around the Sun, explaining the origin and
evolution of the star would not present the slightest difficulty."
http://www.vestnik.com/issues/2001/0327/koi/kharkovsky.htm
Alexander KHARKOVSKY (New Jersey) EXPEDITION TO PLUTO: LET'S NOT
BE TOO LATE...
I would put two questions to readers who are interested in space. How many planets
are there in the Solar System? And which of the large planets, Neptune or Pluto,
is farther from the Sun?
If you have forgotten your school astronomy course, do not hurry to look for the answer in
textbooks, even the newest ones. It simply is not there. It is not students but
professors who are racking their brains over the answer... The stumbling block for them has been the small, distant,
cold planet Pluto.
Recently, about a hundred astronomers gathered at the observatory in the town of Flagstaff
(Arizona) for a conference devoted to the study of the planet Pluto. At first glance, it was
an ordinary meeting. Moreover, it seemed that they had devoted too much attention to the smallest
and most distant of the planets of the Solar System. But the scientists came to the conclusion that
this unimaginably cold celestial body is one of the most interesting
objects of planetary research.
"Pluto is the only member of the Solar System that has not been
observed up close, and without it our views (on the origin of the planets. – A.Kh.)
remain incomplete," declared conference participant Professor Stern.
In conclusion, the scientists decided that an automatic probe should be sent
on a flyby of Pluto. And this must be done immediately, otherwise the next convenient
opportunity will come only in... 150 years.
At first glance, why the rush? Pluto is not Mars, where we still hope
to find traces of other, extraterrestrial life, or even monuments of a vanished civilization. But
astronomers believe that Pluto is the Rosetta Stone [35] of the Solar System, where
the key to the secret of the origin of the Sun and the planets is kept.
At the beginning of the century, the expression "family of planets" was understood almost literally. There was
an unknown star – the Father – which came close to our luminary and by its
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attraction raised a gigantic hump on the surface of Mother Sun, which,
breaking away into open space and gradually cooling, disintegrated into the series of
planets known to us.
This hypothesis never became a theory – much in it contradicts the laws of
celestial mechanics and astrophysics. Besides, at the beginning of the 20th century only
eight planets were known: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The last of these was discovered "at the tip of a pen." Observing the oddities of the orbit of Uranus,
the English mathematician J. Adams predicted the existence of a "disturber of the peace"
– an unknown planet. The Frenchman U. Le Verrier carried out similar calculations and informed
the Berlin Observatory where in the sky and when it could be found. The new planet
was found, photographed and named – Neptune.
Thus a great discovery was made. But was Neptune the last planet? What if
yet another large celestial body revolves around the Sun beyond Neptune? Both scientists and
science-fiction writers set about searching for "Planet X." Thus the Russian writer Belyaev, in his
science-fiction story, described it as an exact copy of the Earth, located on the Earth's
orbit, but on the other side of the Sun, invisible from Earth. Astronomers, for their part, searched for
"Planet X" either in the vicinity of the Sun, in front of Mercury, where it might be lost in the
sunlight, or far from the daytime star, in utter darkness, beyond Neptune.
The search for "Planet X" was crowned with success in 1930: analyzing the oddities of the
orbit of Neptune, the young American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered a "star" of the 15th
magnitude. This was the new, ninth, planet of the Solar System, named Pluto,
after the god of the underworld. But how strange and unlike its sisters the new
celestial body turned out to be!
Pluto is smaller than the other planets and even than the Moon (its diameter is 2300 km, five times
smaller than the Earth's). At perihelion, that is, "close" to the Sun, Pluto is 30 times farther from it
than the Earth is, and at aphelion, far away, 50 times. In the first case it becomes not the ninth
but the eighth planet, since it is closer to the Sun than Neptune. And it revolves
not like the other planets, upright, with a tilt, but as if lying on its side.
Pluto completes one revolution around the Sun in almost 250 years. But that is not all. In
1978 the American J. Christy discovered that this tiny planet – Pluto's mass
is 400 times less than the Earth's – has an even tinier satellite, and named it Charon,
after the mythical ferryman across the River of Oblivion to the kingdom of Pluto.
Charon is as strange as Pluto itself. In the Solar System there is no other satellite
that is only slightly smaller than its planet. And is Charon even a satellite? It
revolves not around Pluto, but waltzes together with that planet around some
point above Pluto.
Before us is, in essence, the only double planet in the Solar System. If we
add to this that tiny Pluto has managed to hold on to an atmosphere (consisting
mainly of nitrogen), which freezes when the planet is far from the Sun, then before us
appears an extremely strange small double celestial body.
Pluto is a violator of order in the family of planets. It is known that there are four
Earth-like planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Beyond them, far from the Sun,
come the gaseous giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And at the very
edge of the ecumene lies this strange Pluto.
Pluto spoils the whole picture of the origin of the planets from a certain protoplanetary cloud,
which is believed to have surrounded the Sun about four billion years ago.
According to this theory, as it cooled, clumps separated out of this cloud; they
differentiated upon collision, forming planets of two kinds –
Earth-like and giant.
And how did Pluto form? And is it a planet? It still seems to be a planet. Since
planets are spherical and are located on so-called permitted orbits,
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obeying "Bode's law." Pluto too is on such an orbit. But how did it get
there?
Until recently it was thought that Pluto was an escaped satellite of Neptune. But
observations show that this is not so, since it never approaches Neptune closer than
Uranus to the Earth, that is, a distance of 16 astronomical units (an astronomical
unit is 150 million km).
So what is it? An asteroid? No, asteroids are usually not spherical, but
Pluto is shaped like a ball. A planet? Perhaps. But some strange one. Astronomers
call it "this celestial body" or "this object." One thing is clear – Pluto, like
poetry, "exists, and doesn't give a damn." And in doing so it undermines the foundations of the generally accepted
hypothesis of planet formation. Scientists, of course, cannot rest while there is no
answer to the fundamental question: how the Solar System formed. New
hypotheses come into play.
Thus Professor A. Stern suggested that in the space beyond Neptune
there is a land of Lilliputian planets. The largest of them is Pluto, smaller are
Charon and Triton, the satellite of Neptune. They are followed by spherical celestial bodies
with a mass 10-50 times smaller than that of Pluto.
The latest research has confirmed Stern's hypothesis. The belt of small planets was
named the Edgeworth-Kuiper Disk of "Ice dwarfs" (Edgeworth-Kuiper Disk of "Ice
dwarfs"). Thus Pluto, a dwarf among the large planets, turns out to be a giant
among the Lilliputian planets. The land of Lilliput is located at a distance of more than 40
astronomical units from the Sun, and its first inhabitants were discovered at the end of the 20th
century.
Professor Stern supposes that there were several thousand such small planets, with diameters of one thousand
to two thousand kilometers, but many of them, according to the laws of
celestial mechanics, were thrown out into interplanetary space and left the
Solar System, and only hundreds of these dwarfs remained on stable
orbits around the Sun. Pluto has survived, since it revolves in a stable orbit, elliptical, like
those of the other eight planets.
But if we accept Stern's hypothesis, then the small planets of Pluto's family (not to be confused
with asteroids) are not a deviation but the norm for the Solar System. In that case the eight
large planets (the Earth among them) look against the background of these dwarfs and Lilliputians not
merely like giants, but like monsters of evolution, something like the brontosaurs of the world of planets.
If this is so, then the current hypothesis of the formation of celestial bodies around the Sun
will have to be fundamentally revised, for it does not take into account its principal and most
numerous population – the Lilliputian planets.
However, a true theory can be created only when the
process of their formation becomes clear. And for this a space probe from Earth must fly by
Pluto and study its surface and atmosphere, in which the history of
the formation of both Pluto itself and its relatives, the dwarf planets, is as if encoded. And this is possible
only before the onset of "winter" on Pluto, when its atmosphere will freeze and fall onto the
surface, turning the planet into a cosmic Arctic Ocean – only this ice will
be made not of water, but of frozen liquid nitrogen.
In our time Pluto has already begun to move away from the Sun. The collapse of its atmosphere, by
calculations, will occur somewhere between 2005 and 2020. So the probe must arrive
before the collapse, since the next convenient opportunity will come only in 150 years.
Specialists have developed a program for the flyby and study of Pluto.
The existing Titan 4 and Centaur rockets are to place two
ultralight automatic probes, weighing 160 kilograms each, on its trajectory. The flight to the distant planet
will take about eight to nine years.
In the late 1990s the NASA "Pluto-Kuiper Express" team presented
the concept of its project with an estimated cost of around
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half a billion dollars. The project was approved by NASA. Active
work got under way on an extremely tight schedule – the launch was planned for December
2004. However, on October 13, 2000, NASA decided to stop work on the project
and develop a new program to reach Pluto by 2020. It is possible that
this "stopping of a train at full speed" will lead to a postponement of the launch date, and the probes
may find Pluto encased in the armor of a frozen atmosphere.
By solving the riddle of Pluto, Charon and the Lilliputian planets, we will come closer to
understanding not only the past of the Solar System, the processes of its birth and
evolution, but also its future.

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