In the 18th century, astronomers empirically discovered a pattern in the distances from the Sun to the planets of the solar system. It implied that there must be another planet between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter. This mysterious planet is what we will talk about today.
History of the search
In 1766, German astronomers Johannes Titius and Johannes Bode presented a formula they had discovered that described a pattern in the distances of planets from the Sun. That this formula worked well was proved by the discovery of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in the places where it predicted. But nothing was found between Mars and Jupiter for a long time.
After a long search, in 1801 the planet was discovered by Giuseppe Piazza. Calculations of its orbit showed that the object is exactly at that distance from the Sun, which was predicted by the Titius-Bode rule. The newly acquired planet was named Ceres after the patroness of Sicily, where Piazza worked.
What actually happened to the planet Phaeton?
In 1802, however, another planet was found between Mars and Jupiter, which was named Pallada. In 1804, scientists discovered a third small planet at the same distance from the Sun, Juno, and a few years later Vesta was found. Scientists were concerned because instead of the predicted one planet, they found four minor planets. The stream of discoveries of such small planets between Mars and Jupiter continued unabated, and by the early 20th century more than three hundred bodies had been counted.
All of these objects rotate about the same distance from the Sun, this fact led Heinrich Olbers to believe that these bodies could have been debris from one large planet, which he named Phaeton.
Why was Phaeton destroyed?
In the 19th and 20th centuries, there were many hypotheses about the destruction of the planet. More often they appeared in science fiction, in which intelligent beings lived on the planet and their actions destroyed the planet. But sometimes ideas about the destruction of Phaeton also appeared in the scientific environment. Scientists at the time put forward the most different estimates of when Phaeton was destroyed, from 3.5 billion years to even 12,000-25,000 years. Each supposed date of Phaeton's destruction was associated with catastrophes that occurred in geological history. Hypotheses have gone as far as to say that the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs was a fragment of Phaeton.
Among the scientific versions of Phaeton's demise were a dangerous approach to Jupiter, which destroyed the planet, as well as a collision with its own satellite or another planet.
Was there a Phaeton?
Hypotheses about the existence and destruction of Phaeton multiplied until the end of the 20th century, i.e. almost two centuries, thanks to which they were firmly fixed in the culture and in the minds of many people. All this time the main argument against the existence of Phaeton was that to destroy an entire planet would require too much energy, which simply could not be found. But in the late '90s and early '00s, new research and much more accurate modeling of the solar system was done than had been done before.
What actually happened to the planet Phaeton?
It turned out that, firstly, the total mass of the asteroid belt is only 0.05% of the mass of the Earth, which is clearly not enough for the formation of the planet, and secondly, that due to the gravitational influence of Jupiter in the asteroid belt in principle can not form a planet. Modern studies of the asteroids in the belt indicate that they all have a different chemical composition, which means that they cannot be debris of the same object.
Based on all this, modern science believes that such a planet as Phaethon never existed, but various kinds of ufologists continue to believe in it and build their pseudoscientific theories about it.
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