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Birth of the Solar System.
Ken Glasziou
Discussing the origin of the solar system, The Urantia Book states: "As Angona more closely approached the sun, at moments of maximum expansion during solar pulsations, streams of gaseous material were shot out into space as gigantic solar tongues. At first these flaming gas tongues would invariably fall back into the sun, but as Angona drew nearer and nearer, the gravity pull of the gigantic visitor became so great that these tongues of gas would break off at certain points, the roots falling back into the sun while the outer sections would become detached to form independent bodies of matter, solar meteorites, which immediately started to revolve about the sun in elliptical orbits of their own." (656)
The book informs us that this state continued, "for about 500,000 years until Angona made its closest approach; whereupon the sun, in conjunction with one of its periodic internal convulsions, experienced a partial disruption; from opposite sides and simultaneously, enormous volumes of matter were disgorged." (656)
As described above, the initial periodic internal convulsions of the newborn sun appear to have been unidirectional and independent of the approaching Angona, and only at the sun's partial disruption did matter get extruded from its opposite sides. Eventually, time will tell whether theorists come up with an explanation for such events.
The book states that the Angona system captured none of the solar matter, but our sun did capture material from Angona, among this being three tributaries which included three major planets. It adds, "the impact of the three tributaries injected new and foreign directional forces into the emerging solar system with the resultant appearance of retrograde motion." (657)
The Angona system is portrayed as a passing dark giant of space, solid, highly charged and possessing tremendous gravity pull. At our present state of knowledge this could be a description of an astronomical system accompanying either a black hole or a neutron star. In the mid-1930's, both of these ideas belonged to the realm of science fiction, and even at 1955, the year the book was published, the concepts were more fictional than scientific.
Evidence for the participation of a secondary system during the birth of our solar system comes from the studies of meteorites (Dyson2). In a supernova explosion, a small fraction of its energy may be converted into the nuclear energy of unstable atoms of thorium, uranium, and plutonium, and small amounts of these radioactive elements may be injected into the interstellar gas. This appears to be the only mechanism that can create the special conditions for the production of such fissionable nuclei.
According to Dyson, the evidence that a local violent environment existed immediately before the birth of the solar system is contained in the presence of xenon gas in certain ancient meteorites which has the isotopic composition characteristic of the products of spontaneous fission of plutonium 244. It is likely that this violent environment and the origin of the solar system were part of the same sequence of events. Supporting evidence is provided by radiation damage in the form of fission tracks that can be made visible by etching. The meteorites do not contain enough uranium or thorium to account for either the xenon or the fission tracks. They must have contained plutonium at the time that they solidified. Plutonium 244 has a half life of only 80 million years, hence the meteorites must be as old as the solar system and must have originated close, in both time and space, to the event that gave birth to the sun. A possibility would be that the Angona system was the result of a supernova explosion, perhaps one involving a twin star system inclusive of planets, occurring in the order of about 100 million years before the time of formation of the solar system.
According to The Urantia Book, retrograde motion in any astronomical system is always accidental and the result of collisional impact of foreign space bodies. In our solar system, retrograde motion is exhibited by Venus, Uranus, and Pluto, as well as the four outer moons of Jupiter which orbit it in the opposite direction to its other twelve moons.3
The Urantia Book also states that 2 billion years ago our planet captured enormous space bodies that markedly increased its mass. (659) In "The Planets," Henbest tells us that the peculiar composition of planet Mercury, plus other parallel evidence, has caused astronomers to now think that the birth of the "rocky" planets (Venus, Mercury, Earth, and Mars) involved collisions between bodies we can think of as giant asteroids or small planets.3
The Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered evidence that must cause theorists to re-think ideas about the formation of planetary systems and the involvement of jets of material originating from newborn stars. In studying what The Urantia Book states about the origin of the solar system, readers need to keep in mind that it remarks that most planets have an entirely different origin. (466) Readers also need to keep in mind that because of their mandate, the revelators were restricted to using outdated mid-1930's scientific opinions but were also permitted to supply certain key pieces of enlightening information. (1110)
One example of key information may be the time given for the origin of the solar system at
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