“Humble, modest and extremely intelligent”: how a Soviet mathematician quietly solved the mystery of planet formation

“For many years he had the field of planet formation which he virtually created himself. Most of his Soviet colleagues were skeptical and indifferent; his research seemed too speculative, as of yet there isn’t any evidence.”

We only know how the planets in our solar system formed in the last 100 years. In the excerpt below from “What’s Gotten Into You” (HarperCollins, 2023), Dan Levitt looks at the Soviet mathematician who spent a decade solving a problem that most astronomers had abandoned. over and when he finally solved it, it was solved. with indifference and skepticism.

More than 4.Eight billion years ago, the atoms that make us up were moving in giant clouds of gas and dust, toward… well, nothing. There is no solar system, no planets, no Earth. In fact, for a long time, scientists couldn’t explain how our solid planet, let alone one so hospitable to life, came to be. How was our present rocky planet created, as if by magic, from an ethereal cloud of gas and dust? How and when did Earth become so welcoming to life?And what tests will our molecules be forced to face until life can evolve?

Scientists will learn that our atoms can ultimately produce life only after enduring painful collisions, meltdowns, and bombardments—catastrophes that threaten any destruction that humanity has ever witnessed.

Explaining how our planets were created seemed so difficult that by the 1950s most astronomers had given up. Their theories seem to lead nowhere. Two centuries ago, German philosopher Emmanuel Kant and French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace began, quite promisingly, by correctly theorizing that gravity swirls in a giant cloud of gas and dust. Spins so tightly that intense heat and pressure burn it into a star. . – our sun.But how are planets formed? They think that a disk of dust and stray gas is always orbiting the Sun and that it is breaking up into smaller clouds that create planets. However, no one has been able to convincingly explain how disk broke up or how planets formed from these small clouds.

In 1917, Englishman James Jeans adopted an innovative approach and, as we have seen, Cecilia Payne’s contemporaries approved. Jeans theorizes that the gravitational pull of a passing star is so strong that it rips huge clumps of gas from the sun’s surface – and they become planets.Others suggest that our planets are debris left behind by collisions between stars. But no one could have predicted how the nine distant planets would form after such a collision. It’s likely you’ve put your wet laundry in the dryer and then opened it up to find your clothes are not only dry but also neatly folded. Only a few astronomers continue to consider this question seriously. Astronomer George Wetherill commented that it was a question worthy of “innocent entertainment” or “scandalous speculation.”It’s just unclear whether we can go back that far in time.

However, in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, a young physicist decided to attack the problem head-on – with mathematics. His name is Viktor Safronov. Safronov was small and battled malaria, a legacy of his military training in Azerbaijan during World War II. He is humble, humble and exceptionally intelligent. At Moscow University, he distinguished himself with advanced degrees in physics and mathematics. Recognizing his talent, mathematician, geophysicist and polar explorer Otto Schmidt recruited him to the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Schmidt himself, like Kant and Laplace before him, was certain that our planets were created from a disk of gas and dust orbiting the Sun. He wanted someone with technical skills to help him find a way, and the soft-spoken Safronov was an excellent mathematician.

Schmidt himself, like Kant and Laplace before him, was certain that our planets were created from a disk of gas and dust orbiting the Sun. He wanted someone with technical skills to help him find a way, and the soft-spoken Safronov was an excellent mathematician.

In fact, the lack of a computer may even have helped by forcing him to hone his already formidable intuition.

In his office at the Academy of Sciences, Safronov started from scratch. He took on the difficult task of trying to explain how trillions of gas and dust particles could make up a solar system. He would attempt to do this using mathematics – mainly statistics and the equations of fluid dynamics, which describe the flow of gases and liquids. All this without a computer. In fact, the lack of computers may even have helped by forcing him to hone his already formidable intuition.

Safronov begins by assuming that our solar system first formed when the giant primordial cloud of dust and gas, which we left floating in space in the previous chapter, was transformed by gravity the unceasing force of stellar gravity. Almost everything (99%, we know now) has become our sun. But the remaining ruins are too far away to be pulled towards the sun, but not far enough to completely escape its clutches. Instead, gravity and centripetal rotation flattened the cloud into a disk of dust and gas orbiting the sun.

Safronov, who stunned his colleagues with his ability to make rapid mathematical estimates, began calculating what happened when tiny particles inside the disk collided with each other and then collided with each other their neighboring particles.With pencil, paper and ruler, perhaps in the quiet of the library where Soviet scientists often retreated from the hubbub of large communal offices, he stubbornly tried to estimate the impact of trillions of collisions. It’s an extremely arduous job, with or without a computer. By comparison, you might think that calculating the path of a storm from the first drops of water that form in the clouds would be child’s play.

Safronov realized that the cosmic dust and gas orbiting the sun would move at roughly the same speed and in the same direction. Sometimes, when particles collide with neighboring particles, they stick together like snowflakes. More and more collisions create larger and larger clusters, until they become as big as rocks, ocean liners, mountain ranges and finally small planets. Based on his profound understanding, Safronov single-handedly exposed most of the major problems that scientists need to solve to explain the origin of our planets. And with his mathematical courage, he won over many people.

For many years he had the planet formation zone which he virtually created for himself. Most Soviet colleagues were skeptical and indifferent; His research seems too speculative, with no evidence to date.Then, in 1969, Safronov published a small paperback, reminiscing about his decade of solitary work. He gave a copy to a visiting American graduate student, who passed it on to NASA with an offer to publish it. Three years later, the English version appeared in the West.

This will revolutionize our understanding of how Earth and all the planets were created.