Abstract
PROF. HAROLD JEFFREYS has published a paper in which here examines a number of theories proposed to explan the origin of the solar system1. In the early part of the paper he points out that the resonance theory of the origin of the moon can no longer be maintained ; and, in fact, it was shown many years ago to be quite untenable for various reasons, though it is still referred to in popular works as a possible explanation of the existence of our satellite. Dealing with the origin of the planetary system, he refers to his earlier view of a collision between the visiting star and the sun, which appeared to make some successful quantitative predictions, but which Russell showed to be dynamically unsound. Lyttleton's theory that at the time of the encounter with the visiting star the sun was a double star, and that the encounter was with the companion, seemed to offer a way out of the difficulty. On this theory there was the possibility that the visiting star and the companion would escape from the neighbourhood of the sun, and yet leave a considerable fraction of the ejected matter revolving around the sun. Nevertheless, as Jeffreys shows, in all catastrophic theories there is a fundamental difficulty. In Jeans's tidal theory it was assumed that the elongated filament would be gravitationally unstable and would break up into a number of pieces—a view which is difficult te maintain if the matter ejected from the sun (or its companion) had an initial high temperature. Jeffreys investigated a number of cases nearly twenty years ago and showed the difficulties in the view that the gravitation of the mass could maintain equilibrium, though there was the possibility that adiabatic cooling during expansion would lead to the formation of liquid drops at an early stage, and thus the pressure might be relieved before the velocities became uncontrollable. More recently, Spitzer dealt with the same problem and concluded that during the expansion of cylindrical and ribbon-like filaments these would disappear completely.
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References
Mon. Not. Roy. Astro. Soc., 108, 1 (1948).
Mon. Not. Roy. Astro. Soc., 105, 244 (1945).
Mon. Not. Roy. Astro. Soc., 106, 406 (1946).
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Origin of The Solar System. Nature 163, 262–263 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163262b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163262b0