July 20, 2002 | David F. Coppedge

A “Completely Different Slant” on Solar System Formation

51; “Did great balls of fire form the planets?” New Scientist asks.  A new theory “challenges the notion that the solar system started out as a placid sea of dust motes which simply clumped together to form planets.” If accepted, it “puts a completely different slant on what happened in the early solar system in the first 2 million years.”
    Ian Sanders (Trinity College, Dublin) proposed that a nearby dying star with six times the mass of the sun sent asteroid-sized blobs of magma hurtling through the solar system.  Radioactivity kept the magma blogs molten.  This led to the formation of the enigmatic chondrules, which contain remnants of short-lived radioactive nuclides.  The colliding material also formed the building blocks of the planets.
    Others find the idea intriguing but problematic.  The blobs should have differentiated into chemically distinct layers – not apparent in chondrules.  It also would impact beliefs about the origin and uniqueness of life.  PhysOrg quoted Dr. Maria Lugaro (Monash University), a member of the international team of astrophysicists who proposed the new theory.  “We need to know if the presence of radioactive nuclei in young planetary systems is a common or a special event in our galaxy because their presence affected the evolution of the first large rocks (the parent bodies of asteroids and meteorites) in the solar system,” she said.  “These are believed to be the source of much of earth’s water, which is essential for life.”

This completely different slant is pretty oblique, all right.  So now Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin should just accept the notion that, 40 years ago, they were starstuff walking on starstuff, just globs of protoplasm walking on old solidified globs of lava.  Assuming the hallmark of humanness is rationality, that sounds like one giant leap backwards for mankind.
    While it’s nice to see some daring new thinking outside the box in science, this idea seems highly contrived.  The evolutionists probably won’t like it.  It makes the origin of the earth much more unlikely, for one thing.  For another, it tends to falsify the long-taught belief that dust accretion is sufficient to build planets.  But where is the evidence for a nearby large star in the right position with the right amount of material to seed our sun with planetary building blocks when they were needed?  How convenient to bring in the material by just-in-time special delivery.  Let’s ask the logical follow-up question.  Where did the dying star get its asteroid-sized blobs, if accretion is no longer in vogue?
    “Great balls of fire” belongs in a rock concert, not a science lab.  This proposal should call into question whether imagining “notions” after the fact is really scientific.  Are scientists supposed to be sitting around inventing notions? (notion, n.: vague or imperfect conception or idea of something; a fanciful or foolish idea; whim).  You thought science was about testing theories with evidence.  The notion in this story amounts to little more than an ad hoc speculation concocted to save the old notion from anomalies.  There’s an ad hoc here and an ad hoc there, here a hoc, there a hoc, everywhere an ad hoc.  One doesn’t normally add hawks to the science farm.  If Old MacDonald Observatory ever hawks this theory, they should quickly hear some philosophical moos and oinks from the sentient animals.

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Categories: Solar System

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