Why?

The SN model suggests mass is ejected from the SN event at about 1% of light speed and is partly heavy elements. Would this matter slow down over time? And how fast would stuff from the proposed EPH event be moving? It seems to me the velocity is well above the escape velocity of the solar system and so only a small amount of the total mass would stick around the sun.

All of the planets and moons have been pelted by millions of bits of stuff on several occasions, including the event 3.8 BYA. And some of the bits left evidence that they were way too large to have come from an explosion that was not inside the solar system.

Most of the evidence we have for these events is here on Earth (for obvious reasons), but not all of it. Evidence from elsewhere in the solar system includes the moon Iapetus at Saturn. It takes nearly three months to rotate.

Deduce the consequences - if a planet really did explode between Mars and Jupiter, the blast wave from it would take about one or two or three or four weeks to sweep past Iapetus, depending on the speed of the wave and how much of the planet was vaporized and so on (IOW, depending on your model of the explosion). Since Iapetus rotates so slowly, it would have recieve its pelting of millions of bits of stuff all on one side, and since it is airless the deposited material would remain in place for a long time. What do we see when we look at Iapetus? One side is much lighter than the other, as if a blast wave had swept past it and deposited a lot of stuff on the side facing the blast.

The speed of an explosion's blast wave is primarilly dependent on the energy of the explosion. Supernovas can eject some material at 10% or more of the speed of light, with the average speed for all ejected material probably running around 1%. A planetary explosion is not likely to result in a blast wave maximum speed of more than a few times escape velocity. Average for all material ejected can be under escape velocity.

Once again, the devil is in the details and until we actually see some of these planetary explosions our attempts to create a model to help us think about them will be little more than guesswork. But if we are careful with our guessing, we can probably come up with proposed answers that are within the ball park. We just need to remember that the answers are not exact.

LB

Several times the solar system was pelted by millions of huge rocks we call meteors. One of these several events can be dated to 3.8bya. Can any of the other events be dated?

There are at least 13 medium to large craters on Earth that date to approximately 65 MYA. Chicxulub on the northern edge of the Yucatan Peninsula is one of them. It is often cited as the cause of the dinosaur extinction and the iridium layer at the C-T boundary.

It's not impossible that a single asteroid impact could have caused the extinction and the world wide deposits, but a blast wave and multiple hits is a more viable explanation. The Chicxulub impact by itself was small enough that it would have had trouble doing the job. Throw in a few dozen more impacts (some not yet discovered), even if Chicxulub was the largest, scattered around the world and you have a serious smoking gun.

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The observed population of Earth-crossing asteroids and comets ought to have caused a cratering rate on Earth and Luna that is about eight times larger than the observed cratering. This discrepancy goes away if the observed population of potential impactors has only been this high for a few million years.

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Such a high population of Earth-crossers has another time related problem. They will either hit Earth or be ejected from the solar system or into the sun by near misses that this high population density can only last for a a few million years.

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Erosion rates on Mars and Venus are too high to account for the observed crater populations, especially since these craters show so little signs of the expected erosion. If many of the craters are only a few million years old, the problem goes away.

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Until we can go to these places and spend some time studying them, much of this evidence has to be considered provisional. But there are dozens to hundreds of bits of evidence like this. The statistics of this mass of evidence also point in the direction of one or more planetary break-ups. To decide at this point that the Failed Planet Hypothesis must be correct and the Exploded Planet Hypothesis must be wrong is premature.



LB

Data is good-the near Earth/orbit crossing objects will be gone at sometime in the future(?) and so many of them have been lost since they were created(?) Do you have a "halflife" estimate for these objects that could be retrofitted into the current state of this model? It might help to figure the original mass(or not?) The data of the event 3.8bya is on the moon (so I have been told) so maybe data of the event 65mya also is on the moon.

Hi larry, did Tom ever consider that the third planet to explode was the remains of the 8 Earth mass planet that Mars hypothetically orbited? This thing would be essentially a part of the core and would have a lunar mass but it would be rather exotic stuff and perhaps would be more likely to explode again.

The first planet to explode, the one out at the edge of the asteroid belt is less of a problem.

Up to now I've only been able to get Cruithne type orbits form exploding a gas giant but it's early days and I still haven't worked out the time this explosion took. Obviously inner moons would fly off into solar orbits once the bulk of the exploding planet was outside their orbits. This would be at different times.

(Edited) changed the mass to Earth mass, rather than Jupiter mass as I'd idiotically wrote at first.