Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [105]
The emerging picture of the early Solar System does not resemble a stately progression of events designed to form the Earth. Instead, it looks as if our planet was made, and survived, by mere lucky chance,* amid unbelievable violence. Our world does not seem to have been sculpted by a master craftsman. Here too, there is no hint of a Universe made for us.
THE DWINDLING SUPPLY of worldlets is today variously labeled: asteroids, comets, small moons. But these are arbitrary categories—real worldlets are able to breach these human-made partitions. Some asteroids (the word means “starlike,” which they certainly are not) are rocky, others metallic, still others rich in organic matter. None is bigger than 1,000 kilometers across. They are found mainly in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers once thought the “main-belt” asteroids were the remains of a demolished world, but, as I’ve been describing, another idea is now more fashionable: The Solar System was once filled with asteroid-like worlds, some of which went into building the planets. Only in the asteroid belt, near Jupiter, did the gravitational tides of this most massive planet prevent the nearby debris from coalescing into a new world. The asteroids, instead of representing a world that once was, seem to be the building blocks of a world destined never to be.
Down to kilometer size, there may be several million asteroids, but, in the enormous volume of interplanetary space, even that’s still far too few to cause any serious hazard to spacecraft on their way to the outer Solar System. The first main-belt asteroids, Gaspra and Ida, were photographed, in 1991 and 1993 respectively, by the Galileo spacecraft on its tortuous journey to Jupiter.
Main-belt asteroids mostly stay at home. To investigate them, we must go and visit them, as Galileo did. Comets, on the other hand, sometimes come and visit us, as Halley’s Comet did most recently in 1910 and 1986. Comets are made mainly of ice, plus smaller amounts of rocky and organic material. When heated, the ice vaporizes, forming the long and lovely tails blown outward by the solar wind and the pressure of sunlight. After many passages by the Sun, the ice is all evaporated, sometimes leaving a dead rocky and organic world. Sometimes the remaining particles, the ice that held them together now gone, spread out in the comet’s orbit, generating a debris trail around the Sun.
Every time a bit of cometary fluff the size of a grain of sand enters the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, it burns up, producing a momentary trail of light that Earthbound observers call a sporadic meteor or “shooting star.” Some disintegrating comets have orbits that cross the Earth’s. So every year, the Earth, on its steady circumnavigation of the Sun, also plunges through belts of orbiting cometary debris. We may then witness a meteor shower, or even a meteor storm—the skies ablaze with the body parts of a comet. For example, the Perseid meteors, seen on or about August 12 of each year, originate in a dying comet called Swift-Tuttle. But the beauty of a meteor shower should not deceive us: There is a continuum that connects these shimmering visitors to our night skies with the destruction of worlds.
A few asteroids now and then give off little puffs of gas or even form a temporary tail, suggesting that they are in transition between cometdom and asteroidhood. Some small moons going around the planets are probably captured asteroids or comets; the moons of Mars and the outer satellites of Jupiter may be in this category.
Gravity smooths down everything that sticks out too far. But only in large bodies is the gravity enough to make mountains and other projections collapse of their own weight, rounding the world. And, indeed, when we observe their shapes, almost always we find that small worldlets are lumpy, irregular, potato-shaped.
THERE ARE ASTRONOMERS whose idea of a good time is to stay up