Requiem for Relativity

Hi Joe, and the "pairing" of planets? The idea that the proto Venus fissions off Mercury, the proto Earth fissions off Mars. This is for distances out to about earth orbit. Fission of a proto planet at about Jupiter distance would throw the fission particle out of the solar system. In this model the fission process would create a filament of droplets, which could explain our moon. Venus could have had a moon but the sun's tidal effects could make it fall into Venus. The smaller fission body would not have moons but could have orbiting collision fragment, caused by impacts of "droplets."

(edited) just for fun I added pairs of n values and checked the ratio, close to three.

Dr Joe, On Dec7,2010 you posted a list of values for n indicating every body in the solar system has a different value for n. Then on Dec30 you said n is a constant. Am I ever confused now-can you edit these two posts so they are consistent? Your second value for n is very near the constant called Phi so I wonder if it is in fact that number?

Hi Joe, a while ago now someone put up a link to a gravity simulator program, i downloaded and intended to learn it but never got round to it. I decided a couple of days ago to take a look at it again. Looking through the simulations that you can download I found this one which has to be of interest to you. www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/sedna.html

I did try and add a "Barby" to the solor system model, and bearing in mind that I'm still learning this app, it looks as though Barby has the most effect on Mercury's orbit. Though that's really down to Jupiter.

Playing with the Sedna simulation, it struck me that this program could be used to simulate the EPH idea. A quick try out, I made Mars have a Neptune mass and then stuck a bunch of stuff in orbit round it. One of them got nicked by Jupiter. Then I dropped the Neptune mass Mars, down to a mass of zero. Its planets went into a bunch of orbits with varying eccentricities. Anyway, I think it looks quite promising, is there anyone here who knows the program well?

A little update on that gravity simulator. If you go to the website and click on the messageboard, there's a topic for a newer beta version. Scroll down to the bottom of the thread and download and save the three files there. Create a new folder in the grav sim folder and copy the new files into that. There's a lot more functionality to the beta version, including being able to save out stills of the orbits, create a bunch of orbiting objects with a Gaussian distribution etc.

Stoat - that's an interesting kludge to get this simulator to do stuff it was not designed to do.

Kudos

If you are interested in making a more realistic explosion, try these suggestions:

{
According to Tom's most recent thinking, Mars and at least one other object (called Body C, and about the same size as Mars) were moons of a larger planet called Body V that exploded way back when. Mars and Bocy C then orbited their common center of mass until about 3.5 MYA, when Body C exploded.

Body V was a helium class planet of about 5 Earth masses (m_e). When it exploded almost all (99.99%) of it would have vaporizd.
}

To simulate this one -
<ul>
<li>Add a 5 [m_e] mass at about the orbit of Mars</li>
<li>Adjust it's radius to about 1 [km]</li>
<li>Adjust Mars to orbit at about 5 E5 [km]</li>
<li>Add and Adjust Body C to orbit at about 3 E5 [km]</li>
<li>Add a large number of very small masses (as many as you can stand or as the simulator will allow) (Their masses should be tiny, say a thousand tonnes?)(These will simulate the vaporized interior of the planet. In reality these pieces will be a lot smaller [perhaps one gram each, on average?] but for a simulator like this we can take some poetic license.)</li>
<li>Set them to orbit between 1 E2 [km] and 2 E3 [km] (This causes their orbital velocities to be very large, so that when they are released they fly off like explosion fragements. Some experimenting will probably be needed to get this to look right.) </li>
</ul>

Now (if you can get this conglomeration to actually stay in orbit) when you turn down the mass of Body V all those tiny masses will fly out and create something like a blast wave. It should sweep the solar system and escape, with very little left behind.

Mars and body C should end up about where they are, orbiting each other.

{
Body C is small enough that its explosion will be less energetic and should leave a little of its crustal material (1 or 2 or 3% ?) unvaporized.
}

To simulate this one -
<ul>
<li>Start with Mars and Body C orbiting each other</li>
<li>Adjust Body C's radius to about 1 [km]</li>
<li>Add a large number of very small masses (as many as you can stand or as the simulator will allow)</li>
<li>Set them to orbit Body C between 60 [km] and 2 E3 [km]</li>
<li>Divide the mass of Mars by 100</li>
<li>Divide this mass by 1000</li>
<li>Add 1000 or 2000 or 3000 masses of this value orbiting Body C at about 6 E3 [km] (to simulate the unvaporized pieces of the crust)</li>
</ul>

Now (if you can get this conglomeration to actually work) when you turn down the mass of Body C all those tiny masses will fly out and create something like a blast wave <u>with chunks</u>.

If you experiment you might get some of the chunks to orbit the sun sort of like asteroids ... and some others like comets

(Can this simulator save anything that can be posted here?)


Regards,
LB