Re: mars and venus (long)

[William Beaty <billb@ESKIMO.COM>]

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Stephen Murray wrote:

> David, please correct me if I'm wrong (not that anybody here is bashful
> about doing that).
>
> > From your message, I take it that you have looked at assembling an annulus
> of junk into a planet.  If you assume that the planet has no spin, then its
> orbital angular momentum must equal that of all of the junk beforehand.

Hey!  What if the disk of junk is slowly losing relative KE to tiny
collisions between the junk-particles?  Wouldn't this make the whole disk
slowly move outwards (or maybe inwards?)  If so, then the particles'
circular orbits would march slowly along until they encountered a planet.
They would tend to impact on the limb, and speed up the planet in the same
way that an air jet can speed up a flywheel if directed tangentially.

After enough time had passed and enough dust had whacked the planet
tangentially, it might suffer a centrifugal catastrophy, and fly apart
into several large chunks.  (Imagine using an air jet to speed up a
flywheel of jelly until it flew apart.)

Is this where the "broken planets" such as earth/moon are thought to come
from?  I'd always thought that large collisions had knocked off the big
chunks.  Why wouldn't an "overspun flywheel" phenomenon do somethng
similar?


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