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Surprises From Venus And Mercury --


hazelm

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Scientists never considered that a ring might exist along Mercury's orbit, which is maybe why it's gone undetected until now, Stenborg said. "People thought that Mercury, unlike Earth or Venus, is too small and too close to the Sun to capture a dust ring," he said....They describe evidence of a fine haze of cosmic dust over Mercury's orbit, forming a ring some 9.3 million miles wide...Because it's dispersed over a larger orbit, Venus' dust ring is much larger than the newly detected ring at Mercury's. About 16 million miles from top to bottom and 6 million miles wide, the ring is littered with dust whose largest grains are roughly the size of those in coarse sandpaper. It's about 10 percent denser with dust than surrounding space.  ....Of all the possibilities, one group alone produced a realistic simulation of the Venus dust ring: a pack of asteroids that occupies Venus's orbit, matching Venus' trips around the Sun one for one.Their hypothesis would make more sense if the asteroids had been there since the very beginning of the solar system.The scientists built another model, this time starting with a throng of 10,000 asteroids neighboring Venus.

 

 

I wonder if all this mass could be equivalent to the postulated mass of the hypothetical planet "Vulcan," which scientists assumed was there for years in order to fully explain the perihelion precession of Mercury, eh?  Maybe Newton was right all along.

Edited by Moronium
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So what you are saying is that dust permeates the solar system and I should not be concerned about it accumulating on the furniture?

Well, there is that but they didn't say dust permeates the solar system, did they?  I ask because I was thinking that if there are no dust rings beyond Mars, it is because the outer planets are gaseous.  I'm not sure of that, just guessing. 

 

Another thought from this guessing one:  The rings are leftover "flotsam and jetsam" from when each inner ring planet was formed. And that around the sun is for forming a new planet.

 

How is that for good scientific guessing? 

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I wonder if all this mass could be equivalent to the postulated mass of the hypothetical planet "Vulcan," which scientists assumed was there for years in order to fully explain the perihelion precession of Mercury, eh?  Maybe Newton was right all along.

A good thought, too.  Or, could Vulcan be the ring beyond Mars? 

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Well, there is that but they didn't say dust permeates the solar system, did they?  

 

Well, they kinda did:

 

Using a dozen different modeling tools to simulate how dust moves around the solar system, Pokorny modeled all the dust sources he could think of, looking for a simulated Venus ring that matched the observations. The list of all the sources he tried sounds like a roll call of all the rocky objects in the solar system: Main Belt asteroids, Oort Cloud comets, Halley-type comets, Jupiter-family comets, recent collisions in the asteroid belt.

 

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Again, according to wiki, some people have never given up on Vulcan:

 

In 1915, when Einstein successfully explained the apparent anomaly in Mercury's orbit, most astronomers abandoned the search for Vulcan. A few, however, remained convinced that not all the alleged observations of Vulcan were unfounded. Among these was Henry C Courten, of Dowling College, New York...

 

 

Studying photographic plates of the 1970 eclipse of the Sun, he and his associates detected several objects which appeared to be in orbits close to the Sun.[18] Even accounting for artifacts, Courten felt that at least seven of the objects were real.

 

Courten believed that an intra-Mercurial planetoid between 130 and 180 kilometres (80 and 110 mi) in diameter was orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 0.1 AU (15,000,000 km; 9,300,000 mi). Other images on his eclipse plates led him to postulate the existence of an asteroid belt between Mercury and the Sun.

 

...It has been surmised that some of these objects—and other alleged intra-Mercurial objects—may exist, being nothing more than previously unknown comets or small asteroids. No such vulcanoid asteroids have been found, and searches have ruled out any such asteroids larger than about 6 km (3.7 mi).  

Edited by Moronium
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I see no reason why there shouldn't be numerous objects of varying size orbiting the sun.  The three available options are 1) fall into the sun, 2) orbit the sun, or 3) fly out of the solar system.

 

ADD:  I forgot 4) accrete with another mass.

Edited by fahrquad
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