Planet Sputnik (Earth Trojan)

Februrary 9th, 1792 - Slough, Berkshire, England. 6:23 PM.

Sir William Herschel peered through his telescope towards the southwestern horizon. He watched the mysterious blue light in the sky. He had first seen it only an hour before, walking home from the university. The light was bright, brighter than Venus in fact, and did not move relative to the stars in the hours since he first spotted it. He had ran up to the observatory as soon as he saw it. He pointed his telescope towards the dot, focused the telescope, and recoiled in surprise. He looked through it again. It was a blue-white fuzzy disc against the blackness of space. He immediately tore his journal off the shelf and drew a sketch of the object. An eighth planet had revealed itself to the solar system.

A few months had passed, and despite Herschel’s further attempts to name the planet “The Georgium Sidis” after his failed attempt to do the same with Uranus, the planet was named “Sputnik” by a Russian astronomer named Constantina Koroleva, for a simple reason. The orbit of the planet was identical to that of The Earth’s, except it was behind by 60 degrees in the orbit, in a point first described by italian astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange in 1772 when studying the problems of multi-planet gravitational mathematics. The name “Sputnik” is russian for “Fellow Traveller.” The chemical element “Sputnium” of atomic number 29 and mass of 89 grams/mole was named in support of the planet Sputnik’s name. (It would otherwise have been named Yttrium.)

Over the course of the next few decades, the major mystery about Sputnik was a topic of vehement debate amongst the scientific--and even religious--community. The question was just where did Sputnik come from? As the now third brightest object in the night sky, it should have been known since antiquity. Some scientists proposed the concept of a planet-wide cloak of extremely black smoke that was suddenly lifted. Others proposed that the planet may have been hidden by another, closer celestial rock of totally black color (unfortunately, calculations such a rock showed an impossibly unstable orbit). Still others proposed that the planet came out of no-where. This was attractive to some scientists because it would have solved the age-old problem of where planets come from: They simply appear out of nowhere. Other scientists thought the idea revolting, and were sure that there must be some physical process by which planets form.

At no point during this time did anyone find out the answer to the question of where Sputnik came from, but the idea of the planet coming out of nowhere is perhaps the most accurate. Although the idea was eventually abandoned due to better models of planetary accretion in the early days of the solar system, Sputnik did appear out of nowhere. Sputnik was the result of a maximum improbability value in the mathematics of space and time. In fact, the odds of Sputnik existing at all are so unlikely that it should have happened exactly one point twenty one times from the beginning of the cosmos to the the heat death of the universe.




In the real history of our solar system, the Earth and the Moon were formed by the oblique collision of two massive proto-planets: Proto-Earth and Theia. The off-angle knocked debris from the collision into orbit. Not only did Proto-Earth and Theia combine into the planet we know as Earth, but it also left an amalgamation of Proto-Terran and Theian debris in orbit. This eventually formed the moon.

Imagine a lack of the cataclysmic moon-forming impact 4.5 billion years ago. Theia formed at the Earth/Sun Lagrange Point Five as it did in our history, but Earth was smashed to bits by a different collision, and never destabilized Theia’s orbit. The pieces of Earth and the other impactor gradually made their way onto the surfaces of Theia, Mars, and Venus, and the inner solar system looked not too different from the way we recognize it.

The object known as Theia, a proto-planet larger than Mars but considerably more massive and denser, survived, growing further in mass during the solar system’s late heavy bombardment. The planet Theia cooled down from the hot formative period of the solar system, losing its early hydrogen atmosphere and over time gaining a carbon dioxide and nitrogen atmosphere. Water locked under the surface in volcanoes, and gained by the Carbonaceous Chondrite asteroids, was emitted into the atmosphere until it condensed into oceans spanning 70% of the planet. In the oceans, complex chemicals started self replicating. The chemicals became early life, and over billions of years the life built upon itself over and over, competing with each other through the engine of natural selection. The Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere was gradually replaced with an oxygenated atmosphere, and the environment of Theia was very much similar to the environment of Earth today.

By an incredibly unlikely coincidence, both the moon-forming impact and the Theia-preserving impact from four and a half billion years ago seems to have, for a split second in February 1792, occurred all at once in at least one parallel universe.












Sputnik Fact Sheet
Physical
Mass = 0.1598 M⊕ = 0.9544 x 1024 kg
Radius = 0.548 R⊕ = 3495.2 km
Gravity = 0.532 G⊕ = 5.22 m/s2
Density = 0.97 ρ⊕ = 5.35 g/cm3
AtmPressure = 0.58 atm⊕
AtmComposition = N2 (62%), O2 (37%), etc. (1%)
Moons: One minor moon (“Laika”)
Orbital
Orbital Primary = The Sun
SemiMajorAxis = 1 AU
Eccentricity = 0.016
Mean anomaly = 358.617o
Longitude of Ascending Node = -11.26o
Argument of Periapsis = 84.209o
Average Orbital Velocity = 29.78 km/s
Apoapsis = 1.017 AU
Periapsis = 0.983 AU