P0: The Four Pillars of GAU
The Solar System and the Greater Averaged Universe
[The Four Pillars of GAU, Part 0]
Isaac Newton. From [6].
David Noel
<davidn@aoi.com.au>
Ben Franklin Centre for Theoretical Research
PO Box 27, Subiaco, WA 6008, Australia.
The Four Pillars of GAU
During the years 2014 to 2015, a series of researches on the Solar System and the wider Universe which contains it has revealed a lot of new truths, and answered some long-unresolved problems.
These matters have been described in four Web articles produced progressively, with each building on the ones preceding it. This was not intentional. As is often the way in science, solving some existing problems may throw up previously unsuspected new puzzles.
This article, P0 for short, is an Overview of the 2014-2015 articles, intended to provide an easy reference to the many, sometimes apparently disparate, matters covered within them. The Overview does not cover topics in detail. Instead, it includes numerous prompt questions which link to relevant sections within the quartet, and sometimes elsewhere.
Readers may like to go through the Overview without branching off to the question links, or may use them to get greater detail of the topic of interest (and may then return to the Overview by clicking the back command on their browser).
The four articles in the quartet are:
P1: The Cosmic Smog model for solar system formation, and the nature of 'Dark Matter'.
P2: The Oort Soup as the real origin of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
P3: Living In The Universe: (What CMBR tells us about Dark Matter, and much more).
P4: The Greater Averaged Universe (GAU): How the Solar System cannibalizes the Oort Cloud.
Clickable links to the start of each of these articles may also be found at the end of this Overview, under the "Stablemate Articles" heading. There have been some minor changes to the original articles to allow the Overview mechanisms to run.
Each of the articles has an extensive list of "References and Links" for the graphics and matters it contains.
How the Solar System formed
This research started off by looking at an alternative scenario for the formation of our Solar System. Previous theories have assumed that the Solar System grew from a Protoplanetary Disc which surrounded the early Sun.
[What's a Protoplanetary Disc?]
However, there are numerous problems with the Protoplanetary Disc concept. The current research looked at a better approach.
[What's wrong with the Protoplanetary Disc theory?]
Figure 4PGF1. Hypothetical protoplanetary disk around a Sun-like star. From [5].
The Cosmic Smog model started off from a completely different direction. It said, "Suppose the Universe is or was filled with a very thin 'soup' of solid bodies, and solar systems condensed out of this soup?"
Starting from this assumption not only gave a picture of the Universe which matched rather better with reality than older ideas, it led to some fairly astonishing new results.
It's well known that all the orbits of the Solar System planets lie roughly in a plane. It is only approximately a plane, the orbits actually vary by about 7 degrees. Conventional wisdom is that this plane occurs because it was derived from that of the Protoplanetary Disc which was assumed to have formed at the same time as the early Sun.
[What is the plane of the Planets?]
A table at this link shows the orbital tilt for each planet, measured both from the plane of the Sun's equator and the plane of Earth's orbit (these are close). Later on we'll see that the best figure to take is that measured from the plane of the (spinning) Sun's equator.
There are objects in the Solar System lying well out beyond the farthest true planet (Neptune), such as comets, some asteroids, and a number of dwarf planets. To give an idea of the scale of things, our Earth lies 1 AU distant from the Sun (AU means Astronomical Unit). Mercury and Venus orbit at less than 1 AU, while Mars and the Gas Giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are progressively further from the Sun, with Neptune at about 30 AU.
The true boundary of the Solar System lies at about 100 AU from the Sun. Beyond this point, outside what is called the Heliosphere, conditions change. Inside the Heliosphere, a moving body is essentially a slave to the Sun's gravity and obeys Newton's Laws for planetary motion. Outside the Heliosphere, the Sun's gravity is only one source of gravitational attraction among many.
[What is the Heliosphere?]
Checking the orbital tilts of the other Solar System bodies which lie beyond Neptune within the Heliosphere gave an interesting result, not previously well-known. The further these bodies are from the Sun, the greater are their axial tilts. As the edge of the Heliosphere is approached, the axial tilts become randomized -- distant bodies are no longer orbiting in the Sun's equatorial plane, but can sweep in at any angle.
Figure 4PGF2. The plane of the planets and the enclosing heliosphere. From [1].
These orbits may also be tilted right over, beyond the right angle to the plane, so that the bodies orbit the Sun in the opposite direction to the Planets. If the Earth is viewed from a point above the plane (North), it appears to orbit anti-clockwise. Some of the bodies (such as Halley's Comet) orbit clockwise -- called retrograde motion.
The new explanation for this picture is that the early Sun and the planets and asteroids, together with all other bodies now making up the Solar System, were originally randomly distributed within a spherical volume of the "Oort Soup" which filled all local space.
Within this volume, now called the Heliosphere, gravitational forces very slowly regularized all the objects within to bring the closer objects into the same plane as the Sun's equator. This "Equatorial Forcing" had greatest effect nearer to the Sun, with more distant bodies, further out towards the Heliosphere boundary, affected less and so having orbits less close to the equatorial plane.
[What is Equatorial Forcing?]
The new explanation answers, for the first time, a question posed by Isaac Newton some 300 years ago.
[What was Isaac Newton's Question?]
What's left outside the Heliosphere?
So in the current explanation, local space started out filled with a very thin and diffuse scattering of matter particles, so-called planetesimals. In the spherical volume which became the Heliosphere, planetesimals aggregated together to form large and small masses.
The largest aggregation eventually gathered enough mass to reach star size, the point at which hydrogen fusion could occur, and the new sun could begin to give out light (this is standard astrophysics). Other smaller masses in the area, within the gravitational influence of the new Sun, formed the planets and their moons and the asteroids, which under Equatorial Forcing were gradually drawn into their present orbits.
But what about the rest of local space, the huge volume of Oort Soup outside the Heliosphere and beyond the new Sun's gravitational attraction? In our local space, this volume is called the Oort Cloud. If the Heliosphere is taken to extend out to 100 AU, the Oort Cloud beyond its edge has a radius a thousand times greater, out to 100,000 AU. This is almost half-way to the nearest star (each star is typically assumed to have its own 'oort cloud').
Our Oort Cloud and its properties are still largely unknown. Many current speculations about the amount of mass in it put this total mass at a very low figure, maybe only as much as one Earth-mass in the total volume.
Figure 4PGF3. The familiar solar system with its 8 planets occupies a tiny space inside a large spherical shell containing trillions of comets -- the Oort Cloud. From [4].
Applying simple logic to the new Oort-Soup explanation gives a startling contrast to such guesstimates. If our Solar System all aggregated out of the Oort Soup from a sphere the size of the Heliosphere, then the rest of our Oort Cloud might have contained many, many times the mass of the Solar System.
This is a new concept for conventional astrophysicists. Support for the idea comes from a different area of science, the question of Dark Matter.
The mystery of Dark Matter
Back in the 1930s, the brilliant Swiss-American astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky studied the rotations of galaxies and clusters of galaxies such as the Coma Cluster.
[Who was Fritz Zwicky?]
Zwicky was able to estimate the masses of these galaxies from their brightness and distances, and to work out their rates of rotation from Newton's gravitational laws.
Fritz Zwicky. From [8].
He found that these rotation rates did not fall off with distance in the way that would be expected for their apparent masses (worked out from the light they radiated). Instead, they followed a pattern which would be expected if their masses were much greater than their brightnesses indicated -- as if the galaxies contained a lot of matter not in the form of stars.
He called this hypothetical mass "Dark Matter". He did not know what it really was, and for the last 80 or so years, astronomers have been searching for an explanation of it. While many strange and exotic origins have been suggested for Dark Matter, the search has been unsuccessful until now.
[Why was
Dark Matter suggested to exist?]
Estimates of the amount of dark matter in the Universe put it as 10 or more times the mass of the observed stars. That is, the Universe apparently contains a lot of matter which is not aggregated into stars and is not hot enough to give out light.
With increasing understanding of the nature of the Oort Soup, it becomes almost self-evident that this contains much more matter than previously thought. This matter is cold and does not emit light. Dark Matter is merely all the planetesimals between the stars which have not aggregated into star-size masses.
We can look at the nature and density of the Oort Cloud, and the conformation of bodies within it. The conventional assumption at present is that the Oort Cloud has negligible mass compared to our Solar System. P1, the first article in the quartet, showed that in theory, the Oort Cloud could contain as much as a billion Solar masses.
The Dark Matter reasoning puts the Oort Cloud mass at 10 Solar masses or more. Later we will see methods of refining these figures, and why the true figure is much less than the billion masses suggested in P1.
Building a picture of the Oort Cloud
We are gradually moving towards a picture of Oort Cloud matter as being contained in planetesimals, bodies of every size from tiny asteroids up to large planets of the size of Jupiter and above.
Another field of evidence here comes from "rogue planets". These are planet-sized objects which are not apparently connected with particular stars, and, although fairly hard to detect, they are well-known objects in astronomy.
Moreover, there may be huge numbers of such rogue planets -- estimates suggest there may be up to 100,000 free-floating planets for every star in our Milky Way. If this is the case, our Oort Cloud may hold as many as 100,000 planet-sized objects.
[What are Rogue Planets?]
Just for purposes of calculation, suppose our Oort Cloud did contain 100,000 rogue planets, each with an average mass equal to that of Jupiter. Jupiter has about 0.1% of the mass of the Sun, so these rogue planets together would total 100 Solar masses. This is 10 times the amount expected from the Dark Matter approach.
Other large, dark objects are known. In 1998, the discovery of a free-floating planetary-mass object called "OTS 44" was announced [9]. This object, which the article notes "is among the lowest-mass free-floating substellar objects", has about 11.5 times the mass of Jupiter.
Remember that these objects are hard to find, and inevitably the smaller they are, the less likely are they to be found. So there is every likelihood that the Oort Soup contains a vast number of planetesimals, with an appreciable mass. There is also the interesting possibility that many of these objects could exist in "sub-solar systems", orbiting around a central body with enough mass to control these "sub-planets", but not enough mass to achieve ignition and shine as a star in its own right.
The story of Planet Nine
As recently as January 2016, astronomers investigating a feature of the orbits of very distant dwarf planets came up with the conclusion that they were dependent on a previously unknown body out in the Oort Cloud. This planet-sized object, with over 10 times the mass of Earth, was dubbed "Planet Nine".
Figure 4PGF4. Calculated orbit of "Planet Nine". From [10].
Planet Nine is calculated to follow an elliptical orbit around the Sun, coming as close as 200 AU and as distant as 700 AU. These figures would put it well outside the Heliosphere at all times. If actually sighted, whether the object has cleared the path around its orbit of other objects would be one of the tests for it to be classed as a planet.
Clearly this discovery supports the idea that bodies of masses comparable to Neptune may exist quite close to us within our Oort Cloud. Conventional explanations for such bodies rely on them being "thrown out" from the Solar System by unknown forces. How much more logical to assume they are just part of a pervading Oort Soup.
We can move now to looking at the subject from a totally different direction -- how bodies in deep space emit heat.
How bodies radiate heat
All bodies in the Universe emit electromagnetic radiation at all times. If the bodies are very hot, their radiation peaks in the visible part of the spectrum, and we call it light. Bodies which are not quite as hot produce longer-wave radiation, which we perceive as infrared or heat.
Even at normal temperatures, around 20 degrees C, everything emits longer-wave infrared radiation -- an average human without clothing puts out about 1 kilowatt of energy this way. At even lower temperatures, right down to Absolute Zero (minus 273 deg C), radiation is still produced, but at longer and longer wavelengths.
Figure 4PGF5. Blackbody radiation at various temperatures.
[What is Blackbody Radiation?]
The above figure shows some of the electromagnetic radiation bands. The top left shows the range of radiation from the Sun's surface, which is at a temperature of 6000 K (degrees Kelvin, measured from Absolute Zero, so 6000 - 273 = 5727 deg C). This is a very hot surface, and puts out short-wavelength radiation, including the visible band from about 400 to 750 nm (nanometres, billionths of a metre).
The second band shows the radiation from a red-hot surface. Only a small part is in the visible spectrum, just some longer-wavelength red light. Most of the radiation is in the "near" infrared. The Earth's surface, at 300 K (300 - 273 = 27 deg C) mostly radiates in the mid-infrared.
The most interesting curve for us is at the lower right, showing the radiation from a surface at only 3 K, three degrees above Absolute Zero. Some is in the lowest-energy "far" infrared, but most falls in the Microwave band. Notice this curve is marked "Cosmic background radiation".
The relationship between the temperature of an object and its peak radiation wavelength was worked out in the early 1900s by the brilliant German physicist Max Planck, working in Berlin. Planck showed how, on theoretical grounds, wavelength curves like those shown were produced by a body at a given temperature. The body was assumed to be a perfect emitter and absorber of energy, a "black body".
[Who was Max Planck?]
Max Planck. From [7].
If the shorter-wavelength radiation is produced by hotter objects in the Universe, such as stars, from where should longer-wavelength radiation be expected, in the microwave range? The answer, of course, is from very cold objects, cold because they are very distant from stars. The Oort Cloud.
So the possibility of receiving microwave energy from distant objects in space was recognized back in the early 1900s. Did scientists look for it then? Back in that era, equipment to recognize and record microwaves did not exist, astronomers were mostly confined to the visible-light spectrum.
There was one other part of the electromagnetic spectrum which was in general use, this was radio. Radio waves were discovered in the late 1890s, and began to come into use in the 1890s. Radio waves have long wavelengths, beyond those of microwaves. But it wasn't until the 1950s that astronomers -- "radio-astronomers" -- began searching the sky for signals in the radio-wave bands.
Equipment using the microwave bands, between infra-red and radio, didn't come into general use until the development of radar in the 1940s. And these bands only started to interest astronomers in the 1960s.
In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were investigating microwave radio emissions from the Milky Way and other natural sources, and their work was plagued by excess noise in a radio receiver they were building. They found this "static" came from all areas of the sky.
These signals came to be called CMBR, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. CMBR came almost equally from all areas of the sky. It was a very significant, if accidental, discovery, and earned Penzias and Wilson a Nobel Prize for their efforts.
[What is CMBR, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation?]
This CMBR turned out to be the biggest part of the electromagnetic-energy content of our Cosmos. The Universe is awash with radiation of various kinds -- we are most aware of the light from the Sun, and at night, that from the stars. But some 70% of the radiant energy flooding through the Universe is CMBR, and because it is of much lower energy than light, it makes up an even higher fraction of the electromagnetic quanta -- around 95%.
[What is the Radiant Energy of the Universe?]
We have seen that the CMBR is exactly what would be expected from the thermal (black-body) radiation of Oort-Soup matter. Unfortunately, back in the 1960s, our knowledge of the Oort Cloud was extremely limited. And so, in searching round for a cause of the CMBR, a totally spurious explanation based on "radiation left over from the Big Bang" was put forward, and is still in quite general circulation.
[What is the Big Bang?]
The fact that CMBR makes up about 70% of the radiant energy pulsing through our sector of the Universe is good evidence that Oort-Soup material is a very important factor in understanding this sector. Once the link between CMBR and Oort-Soup bodies is recognized, the path opens to using CMBR data to expose the nature of these bodies.
It might be thought that quantitative measurements of CMBR energies could be used to calculate the mass of Oort Cloud material. However, closer analysis shows that CMBR emissions depend on the total surface areas of the emitting bodies, rather than their mass, and these surface areas depend on the sizes of the bodies. A planet twice the size of the Earth would have four times Earth's surface area, but eight times its mass -- so larger bodies of the same material have less surface area (and hence less black-body emission) for a given mass.
Nevertheless, skilled mathematical astrophysicists may be able to deduce results on such things as the mass distributions of Oort-Soup bodies. This is from the general, all-pervading CMBR which fills the sky. Another area which may yield rich pickings is the study of individual sources of emissions in the microwave-infrared areas.
Physical basis of the CMBR curve
The figure below shows how the how the intensity of the general CMBR signal varies with its wavelength. The strongest peak, occurring at a wavelength of about 2 mm, is associated with a temperature of about 2.7 K -- less than 3 degrees above Absolute Zero.
Figure 4PGF6. The CMBR wavelength curve.
What is the physical basis of this curve? The general shape of the curve is defined by the formulas for emissions from a black-body as worked out by Max Planck. We can assume that the 2 mm peak is due to cold Oort Soup bodies at a median temperature of 2.725 K. Populations to the right of the peak, at shorter (higher energy) wavelengths are then due to matter warmer than 2.725 K, and populations to the left are due to matter cooler than that at the peak.
[What does the CMBR curve tell us?]
The familiar CMBR curve does not imply that it all stems from Oort-Cloud matter at 2.725 K. Instead, it is a composite of the curves for all Oort-Cloud bodies. The 2.725 K peak is just the "median" for all such bodies, the most popular value. The Oort-Cloud bodies will vary in temperature, mostly according to their distance from the Sun.
[How do CMBR curves meld together?]
Why should some Oort Soup bodies be hotter than average, and some cooler? The explanation is in their average distance from their closest stars. Warmer parts of the spectrum come from bodies closer to stars, and cooler parts from bodies more distant from hot sources.
Most Oort Soup bodies will be in thermal equilibrium. They will be in continuous receipt of all sorts of radiation from other bodies in the Universe, including CMBR from other bodies, and a bit of starlight from nearby stars. Energy received will be continuously converted and re-radiated as CMBR at the wavelengths appropriate to their temperature.
We can see that on moving in the Oort Cloud further and further away from the Sun, greater volumes of material at lower and lower temperatures will be met with. This is equivalent to climbing up the CMBR curve from the right-hand side.
Why then is there a peak, after which the amount of radiation falls away, as you move down to the left? This happens because as you move very large distances from a star, you begin to receive energy from other stars. So the CMBR peak directly reflects the median distance of Oort Soup matter from stars or other energy sources.
Calculating median distances
The formula for calculating the expected temperature of a body orbiting about a star is reasonably simple to work out. If the star's energy output is known, this output is spread over the surface of a sphere, a sphere whose surface area increases with distance from the star.
The formula applies at any distance from the star, and so can be used to calculate the distance implied by a given emission temperature. Applying the formula to Oort Cloud bodies at a temperature of 2.725 K suggests that their median distance from the Sun is about 14.8 light years.
[How are median distances calculated?]
Now this result is very possibly not entirely reliable, as it takes no account of a number of possible disturbing factors, and may be extrapolating formulas well beyond the circumstances for which they were derived. Strictly, it only applies to our own Oort Cloud, the local bit of Oort Soup around the Sun. But the approach gives a new, and fairly credible, picture of how Oort Soup matter might be distributed.
More massive Oort Cloud bodies
The formula noted above, to work out the temperature of an object distant from a star, is no longer exact when the object is massive enough to generate its own internal heat. Generally, this applies to objects more massive than Mars.
The rule is, the more massive the object, the greater the amount of internal heat it produces. Here on Earth we can measure the heat coming up from below the surface, and it is quite small -- a few thousandths of the energy we get from the Sun.
But move out to Jupiter, which is both much more massive than Earth, and a lot further from the Sun, and the amounts of energy Jupiter receives from the Sun is a little less than what it generates internally.
The CMBR curve shown above is an average for all parts of the sky. It shows very little variation in different directions, this may be just because it comes from a huge amount of Oort Soup objects, which together appear fairly uniform.
It's of interest that the "free-floating planetary-mass object" OTS 44 mentioned above was noted as being hotter than expected [9]. This very possibly is because it is generating significant internal heat.
An interesting possibility is that of picking out some individual larger objects from the general Soup, using telescopes and instruments sensitive to the wavebands of the near-CMBR and the far infrared.
The astronomy of point sources of microwave/infrared emissions
Ordinary telescopes of the sort which have been used for centuries do, of course, make their images from the light (visible waveband) they receive. If this light is from a star beyond our Oort Cloud, only a point image can be detected.
The magnifying power ("resolution") of current telescopes is not great enough to turn any star image into a disc, let alone the image of a exoplanet, a planet circling a distant star. All the exoplanets discovered in recent years have only been detected by measuring instruments -- for example, when they pass across the face of a star and cause a tiny dip in the starlight.
None of the bodies in our Oort Cloud are hot enough to emit light. But they do emit heat (infrared), as we have already seen.
We now have telescopes and related instruments which can pick up this infrared. If you look again at the CMBR curve in Fig. 4PGF6 above, notice that on the right-hand side, at a wavelength of 0.05 cm, the intensity has fallen to almost zero. At this wavelength, we should expect to pick up black-body radiation from Oort Soup bodies at a distance of 3.27 light-years and a temperature of 5.80 K.
Everything in our Oort Cloud is closer than this and so would be expected to be hotter than 5.80 K and emitting at a wavelength shorter than 0.05 cm, in the far infrared. Equipment operating at these wavelengths will be able to pick up Oort Cloud objects as point images.
Figure 4PGF7. Looking for objects in the Sun's neighbourhood. From [15].
Moreover, larger such objects will be generating their own internal heat, and so could be detected as point objects at shorter wavelengths, perhaps in the mid-infrared.
The possibility has been mentioned of "sub-solar systems" existing in the Oort Cloud, with a larger central body, of below star size, and smaller objects orbiting about it. Sufficiently sensitive equipment might be able to detect such sub-solar systems, with the central body warmer (and so emitting at a shorter wavelength) than its satellites.
The hungry heliosphere
In this final section, we can return to the density of matter in the Oort Cloud, and why this is much less than would be expected if our Solar System had simply condensed from a typical volume of Oort Soup.
In P4: The Greater Averaged Universe (GAU), it is explained how, when considering a particular component or event within the larger Universe, it may be useful to view the situation in two parts. First, the Greater Averaged Universe or GAU (the wider background), and second, the specific Local Entity which is being looked at.
The GAU is assumed to be fairly uniform at very large scales, while the Local Entity is set against it or operates within it. The GAU is like one of the great oceans of the Earth, while the Local Entity is like a jellyfish or submarine moving through it, or maybe an ocean current within it.
In our case the Solar System is the Local Entity, and the Oort Cloud represents the GAU. We have already seen how our Solar System is a well-defined entity, with the Heliosphere forming the frontier between it and the wider Universe. Now we can look at one of the consequences of this.
It has already been mentioned that the CMBR is fairly uniform over the whole sky. But it is not completely uniform, there are small variations from one part to another.
In particular, there is a feature called the CMBR Dipole. On the map of CMBR over the whole sky, there is a wide, shallow basin (in the part of the sky where lies the constellation Crater) where the CMBR signal has a small decrease in wavelength (a blue shift). In the opposite direction to Crater, the CMBR signal has an exactly equivalent wavelength increase (red shift).
[What is the CMBR Dipole?]
The Dipole is a Doppler Shift, caused by a rapid movement of the observer (within the Heliosphere) through the Heliosphere's surroundings (the GAU). It's the same sort of Doppler shift noticed from the noise of a passing train -- the sound wavelengths are compressed when the train is approaching you (so its sound appears higher-pitched), and stretched as it moves away (lower pitch).
In our case, the Heliosphere is surging through the GAU, the source of the CMBR waves, at around 600 kilometres per second. This is quite a high speed, even for cosmic bodies. The Heliosphere has its own proper motion through the GAU, it is a long way from at rest in its surroundings.
The CMBR Doppler effect is quite accurately defined. Because the Earth moves in orbit around the Sun at about 30 km/sec, within the Heliosphere, there should be small variations in the CMBR Dipole six months apart. These should occur when the Earth, in the course of its orbit, is approaching to or receding from the direction of Crater. Exactly such a variation is observed.
Gravity wells
Any large mass exerts gravitational attraction on other masses in its vicinity, as the Earth does with the Moon, or the Sun with the Earth. A way of visualizing this is with a gravity well or gravity vortex.
Figure 4PGF8. Earth's gravity well.
In this representation, the Earth lies at the bottom of a well. The sides of the well show how much energy a body needs to stay in orbit around the Earth. To escape altogether, the body needs enough energy to get over the rim of the well.
In the real Universe, gravity wells are usually "traps" into which other bodies can fall -- a body arriving at the rim and falling in needs a lot of momentum if it is to get up the opposite side of the well and out. So most large masses in the Universe tend to trap and retain smaller-mass bodies which they come in contact with. An alternative term for the well is a "gravity vortex" -- just like a whirlpool in the sea, the vortex will try to suck stuff down into it.
In our case, the Heliosphere surging through the surrounding GAU sea will tend to accumulate matter and increase its total mass as it goes. The Oort Soup bodies it is charging through will themselves be following random interacting paths, a bit like Brownian Motion in a liquid.
[What is Brownian Motion?]
Here then is a mechanism by which our Solar System will have gained a much greater total mass than that contained within an equivalent volume of the GAU. Our Heliosphere will have been picking up mass for billions of years, cannibalizing the GAU. And the more it picks up, the greater its gravitational attraction, and the greater its efficiency at harvesting mass.
It is the natural route for masses under gravitational forces to compact together, to aggregate. We usually think of our Solar System as being of fixed mass. But, delving far back into its early history, it is quite possible that the early Solar System had much less mass than now, and has been slowly incrementing itself over a few billion years.
In this way, the Heliosphere may have been harvesting mass out of the surrounding Oort Soup as it surges through. The current mass of the Heliosphere will then be much greater than that of an equivalent volume of the general GAU. This gives an explanation of the relative densities of the Solar System and the surrounding GAU.
Over to you
This suite of articles and its appendages, tagged as COSMOLOGY PLUS, cover a big range of old and new matters in our understanding of our local bit of the Universe. It also includes explanations of some problems posed many years in the past, and till now never answered adequately. Also quite a few answers to problems not even raised before!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
References and Links
[1]. Heliosphere: classical model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#/media/File:72408main_ACD97-0036-1.jpg .
[2]. Chemistry in Protoplanetary Disks. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.3151.pdf .
[3]. Where Everything Is in the Solar System, Right Now.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/where-everything-is-in-the-solar-system-right-now/?WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20160203 .
[4]. Elizabeth Howell. Naked comets could expose Solar System's ancient origin story.
http://www.universetoday.com/116163/naked-comets-could-expose-solar-systems-ancient-origin-story/ .
[5]. Pics About Space. http://pics-about-space.com/solar-system-snow-line?p=2#img12169954759397927649 .
[6]. Isaac Newton Biography.
http://people-db.com/446116-isaac-newton.html .
[7]. TIKPF as I See it. https://budiyatnoheri.wordpress.com/lainnya/biography/max-planck-1858-1947/ .
[8]. Fritz Zwicky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Zwicky .
[9]. OTS 44. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTS_44 .
[10]. New data teases enormous "Planet Nine" may exist. http://www.slashgear.com/new-data-teases-enormous-planet-nine-may-exist-20423757/ .
[11] David Noel. P1: The Cosmic Smog model for solar system formation, and the nature of 'Dark Matter'. http://www.aoi.com.au/Cosmic/index.htm .
[12] David Noel. P2: The Oort Soup as the real origin of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. http://www.aoi.com.au/OortSoup/index.htm .
[13] David Noel. P3: Living In The Universe: (What CMBR tells us about Dark Matter, and much more). http://www.aoi.com.au/Living/index.htm .
[14] David Noel. P4: The Greater Averaged Universe (GAU) -- How the Solar System cannibalizes the Oort Cloud. http://www.aoi.com.au/GAU/index.htm .
[15]. Two Relatively Near Brown Dwarfs. http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=18892 .
Stablemate articles:
P0: -- The Overview article for the four COSMOLOGY PLUS articles:
P0: The Four Pillars of GAU: The Solar System and the Greater Averaged Universe.
P1 -- About the nature of matter between the stars:
The Cosmic Smog model for solar system formation, and the nature of 'Dark Matter'.
P2 -- About the origin of CMBR, Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation:
The Oort Soup as the real origin of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation .
P3 -- How the microwave radiation from the Oort Soup opens up a new branch of Mid-IR astronomy:
Living In The Universe: (What CMBR tells us about Dark Matter, and much more).
P4: -- More about the Oort Soup, and how the Solar System fed from this in its billion-year history:
The Greater Averaged Universe (GAU) -- How the Solar System cannibalizes the Oort Cloud.
Go to the AOI Home Page
Draft Version 1.0, 2015 Nov 20-Dec 8
Draft version 1.1 on Web, 2015 Dec 16. V.1.2, 2016 Jan 28-Feb 18.
V. 2.0 for COSMOLOGY PLUS part 0, 2016 Feb 25.
V.2.01 minor adjustments 2016 Apr 14.
