James Hopwood Jeans - Tidal Hypothesis

Tidal Hypothesis

The Tidal or Gaseous Hypothesis of the earth involves an original sun that had a close encounter with a passing star. Known also as the tidal disruption or tidal filament hypothesis, this conception of how our solar system formed was proposed in 1918 by two British scientists, Sir James Jeans and Sir Harold Jeffreys. Jeans, an astronomer, and Jeffreys, a geophysicist, offered this proposal to counteract some of the objections that had been raised to the planetesimal hypothesis. They accepted the supposed near-collision between the sun and another star but believed that the material pulled out of the sun came out as a long spindle or cigar-shaped filament of solar gases. This gaseous filament later broke up into units which condensed to a molten and finally a solid stage, thus forming the planets. Astronomers have shown that a gaseous filament of this sort would not form solid bodies such as our planets; it would instead simply disappear in space. For this and many other reasons, this hypothesis is no longer acceptable to most scientists.