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Old 08-20-2011, 10:58 PM   #7
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: Planetary Romance and the outer planets

Quote:
Originally Posted by isf View Post
That would explain why my google-fu failed me :). I was hoping for some strange theories or speculation that I had missed.
Actually, if you take a look at Other Worlds, by Garrett Serviss (available via Project Gutenberg), you will find a really strange and cool theory:

Now, the history of the solar system, according to the nebular hypothesis, is a history of cooling and condensation. The sun, a thousand times larger than Jupiter, has not yet sufficiently cooled and contracted to become incrusted, except with a shell of incandescent metallic clouds; Jupiter, a thousand times smaller than the sun, has cooled and contracted until it is but slightly, if at all, incandescent at its surface, while its thickening shell, although still composed of vapor and smoke, and still probably hot, has grown so dense that it entirely cuts off the luminous radiation from within; the earth, to carry the comparison one step further, being more than a thousand times smaller than Jupiter, has progressed so far in the process of cooling that its original shell of vapor has given place to one of solid rock.

A sudden outburst of light from Jupiter, such as occurs occasionally in a star that is losing its radiance through the condensation of absorbing vapors around it, would furnish strong corroboration of the theory that Jupiter is really an extinguished sun which is now on the way to become a planet in the terrestrial sense.


(Serviss, by the way, more or less created the edisonade in 1898 with his novel Edison's Conquest of Mars, an unauthorized sequel to The War of the Worlds.)

How cool is that? Not a cold Jupiter, but a hot Jupiter, not yet cooled to solidity, though sufficiently cooled to be no longer luminous. And possibly with life-bearing satellites.

Bill Stoddard
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