Sedna

 

In a story about the newly (last year) discovered "Plutino" or planetoid named Sedna, the June 2004 issue of Sky & Telescope says: "...the body has a remarkably large and eccentric orbit. Its distance from the Sun ranges from 76 a.u. (11 billion km) at perihelion to an astounding 950 a.u. (about 140 billion km) at aphelion, in an orbit that takes 11,500 years to complete. [Reference: Pluto, the farthest planet is 39 a.u.] The previous distance record holder, 2000 CR1O5 ranges from 44 to 410 a. u. from the Sun in a 3,400-year orbit.

Sedna's location is a puzzle to solar system dynamicists. It's too far away to belong to the Kuiper Belt, the icy bodies ranging from the orbit of Neptune (30 a.u.) out to about 50 a.u. Yet even when farthest from the Sun, Sedna is only a tenth as distant as the presumed inner edge of the Oort Cloud, a vast, long-hypothesized sphere of several trillion cometary bodies that may extend halfway to the nearest star (more than 100,000 a.u.). "It's in no-man's land," Brown says. "We had no expectation of finding anything out there."

"The perihelion distance is a real problem," explains dynamicist Paul R. Weissman (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). "Something must have raised the orbit out of the planetary region." A massive object lurking beyond the Kuiper Belt could conceivably have perturbed Sedna outward. But something so large should have been found by now - unless it too is mysteriously distant.

More likely, Weissman and others say, is a yank from outside the solar system. The perturbing force "has to have been a passing star - there's no way around it," argues Harold A. Levison (Southwest Research Institute). He and Alessandro Morbidelli (Cote d'Azur Observatory, France) postulate that [Sedna] and 2000 CR1O5 represent two of many objects affected by a star that passed within 800 a.u. of the Sun less than 100 million years after the solar system's birth. (Anything skirting by later than that would have severely stunted the Oort Cloud's growth.) To get a stellar encounter so close (about 0.01 light-year) and so early, our Sun must have formed within a dense cluster of stars - an idea that has lacked solid evidence until now. Brown says, "If the stellar-encounter idea is correct, which I'm willing to bet, that means there are an awfully large number of these objects hanging around in space - including almost certainly ones that are Pluto's size and larger."

 

The Urantia Papers say:
[At 41:10.1] Some of the variable stars, in or near the state of maximum pulsation, are in process of giving origin to subsidiary systems, many of which will eventually be much like your own sun and its revolving planets. Your sun was in just such a state of mighty pulsation when the massive Angona system swung into near approach, and the outer surface of the sun began to erupt veritable streams--continuous sheets--of matter. This kept up with ever-increasing violence until nearest apposition, when the limits of solar cohesion were reached and a vast pinnacle of matter, the ancestor of the solar system, was disgorged. In similar circumstances the closest approach of the attracting body sometimes draws off whole planets, even a quarter or third of a sun. These major extrusions form certain peculiar cloud-bound types of worlds, spheres much like Jupiter and Saturn.

 

[57:5.4] 4,500,000,000 years ago the enormous Angona system began its approach to the neighborhood of this solitary sun. The center of this great system was a dark giant of space, solid, highly charged, and possessing tremendous gravity pull.

 

[57:5.5] As Angona more closely approached the sun, at moments of maximum expansion during solar pulsations, streams of gaseous material were shot out into space as gigantic solar tongues. At first these flaming gas tongues would invariably fall back into the sun, but as Angona drew nearer and nearer, the gravity pull of the gigantic visitor became so great that these tongues of gas would break off at certain points, the roots falling back into the sun while the outer sections would become detached to form independent bodies of matter, solar meteorites, which immediately started to revolve about the sun in elliptical orbits of their own.

 

[57:5.6] As the Angona system drew nearer, the solar extrusions grew larger and larger; more and more matter was drawn from the sun to become independent circulating bodies in surrounding space. This situation developed for about five hundred thousand years until Angona made its closest approach to the sun; whereupon the sun, in conjunction with one of its periodic internal convulsions, experienced a partial disruption; from opposite sides and simultaneously, enormous volumes of matter were disgorged. From the Angona side there was drawn out a vast column of solar gases, rather pointed at both ends and markedly bulging at the center, which became permanently detached from the immediate gravity control of the sun.

 

[57:5.7] This great column of solar gases which was thus separated from the sun subsequently evolved into the twelve planets of the solar system. The repercussional ejection of gas from the opposite side of the sun in tidal sympathy with the extrusion of this gigantic solar system ancestor, has since condensed into the meteors and space dust of the solar system, although much, very much, of this matter was subsequently recaptured by solar gravity as the Angona system receded into remote space.

 

[57:5.8] Although Angona succeeded in drawing away the ancestral material of the solar system planets and the enormous volume of matter now circulating about the sun as asteroids and meteors, it did not secure for itself any of this solar matter. The visiting system did not come quite close enough to actually steal any of the sun's substance, but it did swing sufficiently close to draw off into the intervening space all of the material comprising the present-day solar system.

 

[57:5.9] The five inner and five outer planets soon formed in miniature from the cooling and condensing nucleuses in the less massive and tapering ends of the gigantic gravity bulge which Angona had succeeded in detaching from the sun, while Saturn and Jupiter were formed from the more massive and bulging central portions. The powerful gravity pull of Jupiter and Saturn early captured most of the material stolen from Angona as the retrograde motion of certain of their satellites bears witness.

 

P.657 - §1 The planets do not swing around the sun in the equatorial plane of their solar mother, which they would do if they had been thrown off by solar revolution. Rather, they travel in the plane of the Angona solar extrusion, which existed at a considerable angle to the plane of the sun's equator.

 

[57:5.12] While Angona was unable to capture any of the solar mass, your sun did add to its metamorphosing planetary family some of the circulating space material of the visiting system. Due to the intense gravity field of Angona, its tributary planetary family pursued orbits of considerable distance from the dark giant; and shortly after the extrusion of the solar system ancestral mass and while Angona was yet in the vicinity of the sun, three of the major planets of the Angona system swung so near to the massive solar system ancestor that its gravitational pull, augmented by that of the sun, was sufficient to overbalance the gravity grasp of Angona and to permanently detach these three tributaries of the celestial wanderer.

 

[57:5.14] All of the solar system material derived from the sun was originally endowed with a homogeneous direction of orbital swing, and had it not been for the intrusion of these three foreign space bodies, all solar system material would still maintain the same direction of orbital movement. As it was, the impact of the three Angona tributaries injected new and foreign directional forces into the emerging solar system with the resultant appearance of retrograde motion. Retrograde motion in any astronomic system is always accidental and always appears as a result of the collisional impact of foreign space bodies. Such collisions may not always produce retrograde motion, but no retrograde ever appears except in a system containing masses which have diverse origins.