Cradle of Saturn

 CHAPTER TWO

The planetoid had came out of Jupiter. It was christened Athena.

For more than half a century, there had been astronomers dissenting from the mainstream view of planetary origins, trying to make themselves heard. The generally accepted nebular theory, in which the Sun, its planets, and their satellites all condensed together from a contracting cloud of primordial gas and dust, they maintained, was not tenable. The observed distribution of angular momentum did not fit the model, and tidal disruption by Jupiter would have prevented the accretion of compact objects inside its orbit. Some proposed an alternative mechanism for the formation of the inner planets based upon analysis of the fluid dynamics of Jupiter’s core. According to this theory, the giant planet’s rapid rotation and rate of material acquisition would result in periodic instabilities leading to eventual fission and the ejection of surplus mass. The bulk of the shed matter would most likely be thrown out of the Solar System, but lesser drops torn off in the process could go into solar-capture orbits.

In the main, the reaction of the scientific orthodoxy was to dismiss the suggestion as too much at odds with established notions and find arguments to show why it couldn’t happen. Then, after the onset of sudden irregularities in Jupiter’s rotation followed by several weeks of progressive deformation in shape beneath the gas envelope, it did.

Rivaling the Earth itself in size, white-hot from the energy that had attended its birth, and blazing a fiery tail tens of millions of miles long, Athena had been plunging sunward for ten months, all the time gaining in speed and brightness. Spectral analysis showed it to be composed of a mix of core and crustal materials trailing an envelope of ionized Jovian atmospheric gases. Currently crossing the Earth’s orbit sixty million miles ahead of the Earth, it was visible to the naked eye across a quarter of the sky before dawn and after sundown. During the next month it would accelerate into a tight turn around the Sun, bringing it to within a quarter of a million miles at perihelion, covering more than a million miles in an hour and practically reversing direction to pass little more than fifteen million miles ahead of the approaching Earth on its way back to the outer Solar System. It was predicted that the spectacle would dim into insignificance any comet ever before seen in history.