SPS Seminar - New insights into the Solar system’s formation, anchored on 40+ years of interplanetary spacecraft exploration and a quantified ‘gas ring’ reformulation of the original Laplace (1796) nebular hypothesis

When:  Thursday 28^th April at 14.00

Where:  Microsoft Teams - Online

Speaker:  Andrew Prentice (Monash University)

Hosted by: Alexander Barrett
 

Abstract:

The huge bounty of new data about the structure of our Solar system that has been gathered by NASA and ESA interplanetary spacecraft over the past 4 decades has greatly improved our understanding of the physical and chemical processes that determined how the system was formed, some 4.5 billion years ago. So far, every planet has now been visited by an unmanned spacecraft. Highlights prior to 1990 include the Voyager 1 & 2 flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and the Giotto mission to comet Halley. Since then, direct orbital insertion has permitted extended planetary visits. These visits include the Galileo Mission to Jupiter, the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan, the MESSENGER mission to Mercury and the Dawn mission to the giant asteroids Vesta and Ceres. Most recently, the icing on the cake has been the New Horizons spacecraft flypast of the Pluto system in July 2015 and that of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth on New Year’s Day 2019.

In this seminar, I tease out what has so far been gleaned from the various spacecraft missions which throws light on the mode of the Solar system’s formation. I show how much of the detailed structure of the planetary system, and that of the regular satellite systems of Jupiter and Saturn, can be accounted for by the author’s Modern Laplacian Theory of planetary and regular satellite formation (Prentice 1978, Moon and Planets 19 341). The basic premise of this theory is that the planetary and satellite systems condensed from concentric families of orbiting gas rings. These rings were cast off from the equators of the respective rotating proto-solar and proto-planetary gas clouds, driven by a physical process of supersonic turbulent convection. I also discuss how Pluto and its largest moon Charon were formed by the rotational fission of a single liquid globe.

The MLT is noted for its many successful predictions of planetary and satellite system structure, made prior to spacecraft encounters. Most recent of these predictions include the existence of an ancient, watery interior of Charon and the smooth, almost crater-free, surface of Arrokoth [URL: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019AAS...23346701P/abstract ]

BIO:

Andrew Prentice was born in Melbourne in 1943 and educated at Melbourne Grammar School. He subsequently obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the University of Melbourne.  In 1967 he was awarded a Science Research Scholarship by the prestigious Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.  This enabled him to further his studies at the University of Oxford, where he obtained a D.Phil. in theoretical physics.  He also holds the distinction of being the first appointed Junior Research Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. After a short period as research scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Andrew was appointed as a lecturer in applied mathematics at Monash University in early 1972.  From 1988 until 2010 he held the position of reader in mathematics. Presently, he is an affiliate of the Monash School of Physics and Astronomy in Melbourne.

Over the past 50 years, Dr Andrew Prentice has developed a new theory for how our Solar system was formed.  His ‘Modern Laplacian Theory’ is a fully quantified reformulation of the original nebula hypothesis due to Pierre S. de Laplace (1796).  Although the theory sits outside mainstream thought, he has used it to make many successful predictions regarding the physical structure and chemical makeup of the planets and satellite systems of our Solar system.  The opportunity to test these predictions has come about through NASA’s program of interplanetary spacecraft exploration, including most recently the New Horizons spacecraft visit to the Pluto system and to the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth.