Phaeton (planet)
Phaeton (Greek: the radiant one ) was recently called a hypothetical planet that should have an orbit between Mars and Jupiter . The name of the hypothetical planet is borrowed from Greek mythology : Phaeton is on the one hand the epithet of the sun god Helios and on the other hand the name of his son.
history
When Johann Daniel Titius set up an empirical formula in 1766 with what is now known as the Titius-Bode series , which approximately describes the orbital distances of all planets known at the time, he found that this series can only reflect the distances from Jupiter if one also has one Planet inserted between Mars and Jupiter. Phaeton was later used as the name of a hypothetical destroyed planet that is said to have been between Mars and Jupiter.
Therefore, in the years that followed, they began to search systematically for this suspected planet using the celestial police, and in 1801 Giuseppe Piazzi finally found the dwarf planet Ceres in the area in question . More asteroids were quickly found between Mars and Jupiter, the large accumulation of which led to the designation as asteroid belt .
The original assumption that these celestial bodies are fragments of a destroyed planet, however, turned out to be very unlikely. On the one hand, the total mass of all objects in the asteroid belt is considerably smaller than that of the Earth's moon and, on the other hand, due to the strong gravitational disturbances caused by Jupiter, the planetesimals will probably not be able to form a larger body at this point . Today it is therefore assumed that there never was a planet between Mars and Jupiter.
After its discovery in 1983, the asteroid Phaethon got this name. However, it is not a member of the asteroid belt, but a near-Earth asteroid .
reception
Johann Gottlieb Radlof describes the destruction of the planet Phaeton in 1823 in his book Destruction of the great planets Hesperus and Phaeton .
In one of his adventures, Captain Future travels into the past to save the inhabitants of the planet called Katain from perishing. The planet Phaeton is also mentioned in Robert A. Heinlein's story A Man in a Strange World .
In the stories of the author Zecharia Sitchin , the planet Tiamat is mentioned.
The Soviet writer Georgi Sergejewitsch Martynow (1906-1983) wrote between 1955 and 1960 about the discovery of relics of a society of thinking beings on the planet Phaeton, which however broke in the distant past and created the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Geology: Journal for the entire field of geology and mineralogy as well as applied geophysics, Volume 15, Akademie-Verlag, 1966, p. 1129 [1]
- ^ Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner : Handbuch der Meteorologie: for friends of the natural sciences, Volume 1, JJ Palm and Ernst Enke, 1823, p. 406 [2]
- ↑ Stephen Webb: Clash of Symbols: A ride through the riches of glyphs, Springer, 2018, p. 118 [3]
- ↑ Johann Gottlieb Radlof : Destruction of the great planets Hesperus and Phaeton, and subsequent destruction and flooding on earth, 1823 [4]
- ↑ a b c Caryad, Thomas Römer, Vera Zingsem: Wanderer in the sky: The world of planets in astronomy and mythology, Springer-Verlag, 2014, p. 171 [5]