What is the point of a scientific theory? The obvious one is that if you understand you can predict what will happen if you have reason to have that proposition present. Unfortunately, you can lay down the principles and not make the specific prediction because you cannot foresee all the possible times it might be relevant. What sparked this thought is that about a decade ago I published an ebook called “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis”. The purpose of this was in part because the standard theory starts off by assuming that somehow things called planetesimals form. These were large asteroids, a few hundred km in size, and then these formed planets through their mutual gravity. However, nobody had any idea at all how these planetesimals formed; they were simply assumed as necessary on the assumption that gravity was the agent that formed the planets. On a personal level, I found this to be unsatisfactory.
I am restricting the following to what happens with icy bodies; the rocky ones are a completely different story. We start with highly dispersed dust because the heavy elements are formed in a supernova, in which these gases fly out at a very high speed. In one supernova, one hour after initiation, matter was flying out at 115,000 km/second, and it takes a long time to slow down. However, eventually it cools, gets embedded in a gas cloud and some chemical reactions take place. Most of the oxygen eventually reacts with something. All the more reactive elements like silicon or aluminium react, and the default for oxygen is to form water with hydrogen. The silicon, magnesium, calcium and aluminium oxides form solids, but they form one link at a time and cannot rearrange. This leaves a dispersion of particles that make smoke particles look large. If two such “particles” get close enough, because the chemical bonds are quite polar in these particular oxides, they attract each other and because they are reactive, they can join. This leads to a microscopic mass of tangled threads since each junction is formed on the exterior. So we end up with a very porous solid with numerous channels. These channels incorporate gases that are held to the channel surfaces. In the extreme cold of space, when these gases are brought close together on these surfaces they solidify to form ices. These solids filled with ices have been formed in the laboratory.
My concept of how icy bodies accrete goes like this. As the dust comes into an accretion disk where a star is forming, as it approaches the star it starts to warm. If particles collide at a temperature a little below the melting point of an ice they contain, the heat of collision melts the ice, the melt flows between the bodies then refreezes, gluing the bodies together. The good news is this has been demonstrated very recently in the laboratory for nanometer-sized grains of silicates coated with water ice (Nietadi et al., Icarus, (2020) 113996) so it works. As the dust gets warmer than said melting point, that ice sublimes out, which means there are four obvious different agents for forming planets through ices. In increasing temperatures these are nitrogen/carbon monoxide (Neptune and the Kuiper Belt); argon/methane (Uranus); methanol/ammonia/water (Saturn); and water (Jupiter). The good news is these planets are spread relatively to where expected, assuming the sun’s accretion disk was similar to others. So, in one sense I had a success: my theoretical mechanism gave planetary spacings consistent with observation, and now the initial mechanism of joining for very small-scale particles has been shown to work.
But there was another interesting point. Initially, when these fluffy pieces meet, they will join to give a bigger fluffy piece. This helps accretion because if larger bodies collide, the fluff can collapse, making the impact more inelastic and thus dispersing collisional energy. Given a reasonable number of significant collisions, the body will compact. If, however, there are some late gentle acquisitions of largish fluffy masses, that fluff will remain.Unfortunately, I did not issue a general warning on this, largely because nobody can think of everything, and also I did not expect that to be relevant to any practical situation now. Rather unexpectedly, it was. You may recall that the European Space Agency landed the probe Philae on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which made a couple of bounces and fell down a “canyon”, where it lay on its side. The interesting thing is the second “bounce” was not really a bounce. The space agency has been able to use the imprint of the impact to measure the strength of the ice, and found it to be “softer than the lightest snow, the froth on your cappuccino or even the bubbles in your bubble bath.” This particular “boulder” on the outside of the comet is comprised of my predicted fluff. It feels good when something comes right. And had ESA read my ebook, maybe they would have designed Philae slightly differently.
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