Thursday, September 20, 2012

Re-visiting Titus-Bode

Spacewatch: The Titius-Bode Law | Science | The Guardian

I haven't thought about the Titus-Bode law for some time, but the above post gives a good summary of it:
Nasa's Dawn probe has now left Vesta, its ion thrusters accelerating it gently towards the dwarf planet Ceres. It was back on the first day of the 19th century that Ceres became the first object to be discovered in what we now know as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
That something was orbiting in that gap was suspected because of a numerical curiosity noticed a few years before. Known as the Titius-Bode Law, it begins with the sequence 0, 3, 6, 12 etc, where each number after the 3 is double its predecessor Add 4 to each and divide by 10 to arrive at 0.4, 0.7, 1.0, 1.6, 2.8, 5.2, 10.0, etc. To within 5% or so, these correspond with the distances of the known planets at the time when expressed in astronomical units (AU), the unit of the Earth's average distance from the Sun. Mars sits at almost 1.6AU and Jupiter at 5.2AU, but nothing was known at 2.8AU. Belief in the law was boosted, though, when Uranus was discovered in 1781 very close to the next-predicted distance of 19.6AU.
Ceres fitted the 2.8AU slot almost exactly and when other bodies began to be found at similar distances the idea grew that these are the debris from a single shattered planet. We now realise that Jupiter's powerful gravity has never allowed the material there to coalesce into a single object. Whether the Titius-Bode Law is anything more than a coincidence is still debated, but its prediction of 38.8AU fails for the outermost planet, Neptune, which orbits at close to 30AU.

For a co-incidence, it seems a fairly curious one.  If God, or the alien solar system builders, were trying to tell humans something, it turned out to be just a touch too subtle.  Or maybe, now that I think about it, along the lines of 2001 A Space Odyssey, is the missing planet spot where Neptune should be where humans are expected to go to see what's waiting for us there?   Has someone else suggested this before?  (My vague hopes of having an important original thought continue unabated.)

2 comments:

TimT said...

I like to think that stuff like this is God having a good joke.

SteveC said...

That theory reminds me of Anthony Cox's attempts to keep juggling numbers till he finds something to explain global warming, anything except human generated CO2 !