What actually happened to the planet Phaeton?

In the 18th century, astronomers empirically discovered a pattern in the distances from the Sun to the planets of the solar system. From this pattern it followed that there should have been another planet between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter.

In 1766, the German astronomers Johann Titius and Johann Bode presented a formula discovered by them that described a pattern in the distances of the planets from the Sun. The fact that this formula works well was proved by the discovery of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto in the places where it predicted. But for a long time nothing was found between Mars and Jupiter.

After a long search, in 1801, Giuseppe Piazza was able to discover the planet. Calculations of its orbit showed that the object is exactly at the distance from the Sun, which was predicted by the Titius-Bode law. The newfound planet was named Ceres in honor of the patroness of Sicily, where Piazza worked.

However, in 1802, another planet was found between Mars and Jupiter, which was named Pallas. In 1804, scientists discovered a third minor planet at the same distance from the Sun - Juno, and a few years later Vesta was found. Scientists were worried because instead of the predicted one planet, they found four small ones. The flow of detection of such small planets between Mars and Jupiter did not stop, and by the beginning of the 20th century, more than three hundred celestial bodies were counted.

All these objects rotate at approximately the same distance from the Sun, this fact led Heinrich Olbers to the idea that these bodies could be fragments of one large planet, which he called Phaeton.

Why was Phaeton destroyed?

In the 19th and 20th centuries, there were many hypotheses for the destruction of the planet. More often they appeared in science fiction, in which intelligent beings lived on the planet, which destroyed the planet with their actions.

But sometimes ideas about the destruction of Phaethon also appeared in the scientific community. Scientists of that time put forward a variety of estimates of the time of the death of Phaethon from 3.5 billion years to even 12-25 thousand years. Each supposed date of the death of Phaethon was associated with catastrophes that happened in geological history. Hypotheses reached the point that the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs was a fragment of Phaethon.

Among the scientific versions of Phaeton's death was a dangerous approach to Jupiter, which destroyed the planet, as well as a collision with its own satellite or another planet.

Did Phaeton exist?

Hypotheses about the existence and destruction of Phaeton multiplied until the end of the 20th century, that is, almost two centuries, thanks to which they were firmly entrenched in the culture and minds of many people. All this time, the main argument against the existence of Phaethon was that it would take too much energy to destroy an entire planet, which simply had nowhere to come from. But in the late 90s and early 00s, new research and much more accurate modeling of the solar system than before was carried out.

It turned out that, firstly, the total mass of the asteroid belt is only 0.05% of the mass of the Earth, which is clearly not enough for the formation of a planet; and secondly, that due to the gravitational influence of Jupiter in the region of the asteroid belt it cannot form a planet in general. Modern studies of belt asteroids indicate that they all have a different chemical composition, which means that they cannot be fragments of one object.

Based on all this, modern science believes that such a planet as Phaeton never existed, but various kinds of ufologists continue believing in it and build their pseudoscientific theories about it.