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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.
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