A New Model of Planet Formation

"Among all the strange things that men have forgotten, the most universal and catastrophic lapse of memory is that by which they have forgotten that they are living on a star. " - G. K. Chesterton

" The Earth is a noble star. " - Nicholas De Cusa

" This Earth which we inhabit was formerly a star like the Sun. " - Rene Descartes




  A significant amount of evidence has mounted against the current standard model of planet formation. In particular, many recent exoplanet discoveries have contradicted popular accretion models. Scientists are puzzled by the challenges of explaining how the first planetesimals could have formed, why protoplanetary disks appear to be far too small to form planetary systems, where the Earth's water and oxygen came from, why current models predict the absence of Neptune sized planets that seem to be observed regularly, and many other challenges. Other issues, such as the angular momentum loss problem, have been well known for hundreds of years.

  As more observations are being made and as more data comes in every day, it is becoming more and more clear that a new model of planet formation is needed.  An independent researcher named Jeffrey Wolynski has proposed a bold solution to the problem:

"Stars and planets are not mutually exclusive. They are the same thing. A hot, young star cools and collapses to become a planet. Planets are the remains of evolved stars."

  Wolynksi's innovative hypothesis of planet formation has been dubbed "Stellar Metamorphosis". But Mr. Wolynski is not alone is proposing that planets are the cold remains of ancient stars. Though the idea has arisen independently, it can be traced all the way back to Rene Descartes in the 17th Century. More recently, philosopher Anthony Abruzzo's "Transformation Hypothesis" proposes a similar mechanism, and the famous Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin, known for his theory of the "primordial soup", wrote about the same concept in his 1922 book 'The Origin of Life':


"There was a time when the Earth was passing through the same stage of development as the Sun, namely that of being a yellow star. Later, as it gradually radiated its heat outwards into the cold interplanetary space, it became cooler and cooler. It turned from a yellow star into a red one, its light became dimmer and dimmer, and finally went out altogether.  The Earth became a dark planet."
Alexander Oparin, The Origin of Life

"The claim has been made that planets should be viewed as the end products and not the byproducts
of stellar evolution. The overlapping gradations in mass between the heaviest and
lightest spherical objects - presented above for heuristic purposes and without any consideration
to individual variations - suggests just such an evolutionary continuum. It was pointed out that
the germ of the transformation hypothesis traces its lineage to Descartes’ vortex cosmology.
And, for reasons that were very briefly touched upon, it was superseded by Newtonian physics
and consigned to the dustbin of history. However, in reviving the idea, I have endeavored to
show that in some not insignificant aspects it is consistent with contemporary stellar evolution
theory if the time restriction imposed by the Big Bang hypothesis is abrogated.
In a universe of indeterminate age where stellar objects lose mass from nucleosynthesis, solar
wind, red giant phase envelope shedding and finally proton decay, the focus of stellar evolution
shifts from exotic objects like neutron stars, magnetars, preon stars, quark stars and black holes
to mundane objects like brown dwarf stars, gas giant planets, rocky planets and dwarf planets.
This is so because the supposed density levels predicted for the aforementioned exotic objects
turn out to be spurious since the depletion of an object’s mass and the contraction of its radius
occur simultaneously, if we take the known densities of the non stellar objects in our Solar
System as preliminary evidence. Thus, the need to wrestle with tortured descriptions of hyperdense
matter is no longer necessary."
Anthony Abruzzo, 'Are Planets the End Products Rather than the By-Products of Stellar' The basic assumption of stars transforming to become planets, evolving over time losing mass as different chemical compositions form seems to be supported by all known currently known evidence, and it comes with tremendous explanatory power, ranging all the way from the development of young, hot stars in a plasma phase such as the Sun, to cooler red dwarf stars, to gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn through Neptune to Earth, to Mercury and even impact remains such as meteors and the asteroid Vesta. They are all the same type of object, they are all various forms of stars, at different stages of development.

A simple explanation with such explanatory power, supported by so much evidence, should be taken as a serious possibility. Perhaps as the current standard models are shown to be unfeasible, and as discovery after discovery of exoplanet data pours in, falsifying the modifications made to try to preserve those models, at some point mainstream astronomers will have to take notice of Stellar Metamorphosis.