The Fifth Planet: The Asteroid Belt and a War Erased from the Solar System

Between Mars and Jupiter lies a gap that eighteenth-century astronomers refused to treat as an accident. In 1766, Johann Daniel Titius recorded a number sequence that roughly matched the planets’ distances from the Sun. The sequence left a position at 2.8 astronomical units, exactly where another planet should have been. When Giuseppe Piazzi found Ceres at that distance in 1801, astronomers thought they had found the missing world.

Ceres was not a large planet. After it came Pallas, Juno, Vesta, and millions of smaller bodies orbiting the Sun. The region became the asteroid belt. Modern astronomy describes it as leftover material from the birth of the Solar System, kept from forming a planet by Jupiter’s gravity. Another explanation has survived since the early nineteenth century: the rocks are what remains of a world that was destroyed. The lost planet was called Phaeton, or Maldek.