RESEARCH HISTORY

In this section, the documents referring to the history of the first records of these investigations over the decade of the 90s will be presented, starting with the text of the abstract of a manuscript sent to the National Library for the purpose of requesting a Copyright Registration, this document were issued on October 14, 1993.

In the abstract presented, this author emphasizes a gap in the results table for the mean planetary distances to the center of the sun obtained from a similar procedure to that used by Niels Bohr to describe the atomic system:

The model also predicts the existence of a small planet or asteroid in the eleventh position in Table I, corresponding to the integer n = 8, between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, at an average distance of approximately 25 AU from the Sun and a period of revolution of 123 earth years.

The first manuscript on these studies written in English was accepted for publication by the Revista Ciência e Cultura (Journal of the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science) and published in volume 8, number 3, pages 166 to 171, May / June 1996, under the title “A Niels-Bohr Like Atomic Model for Planetary Orbits Description”.

One of the most important consequences of this first article, accepted for publication on October 21th, 1994 and as mentioned above, was the prediction of the existence of celestial bodies located at mean planetary distances around 25 Astronomical Units (25 AU). In communication with the Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences (MAST – Rio de Janeiro), around the end of the year 1995, the astronomer of that institution Dr. Naelton Mendes de Araújo, informed this author of a recent discovery of two asteroids positioned approximately in this distance from the center of the Sun, as predicted by the model. These bodies had provisional designations 1993 HA2 and 1995 DW2, and were located at mean planetary distances of 24.76 AU and 24.17 AU, between the orbits of the planets Uranus and Neptune, respectively. These findings were published in “Minor Planet Circular” (MPC) number 25184 and number 25441 of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), publications of May 14, 1995 and July 12, 1995, respectively.

The article published in Revista Ciência e Cultura in 1996 led to a manifestation of incentive toward these investigations in a letter sent by Professor Dr. Halton Harp, from the Max – Planck Institute of Astronomy (Germany) dated February 24, 1997. Later, Professor Halton Harp quotes this author in his book “Seeing Red”, Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science (Ed. Apeiron, Montreal, Canada-1998). This incentive was essential to motivate the continuity of these researches in the following years.

In 1996 this author asked Professor Dr. Kleber Carlos Mundim, from the Physics Institute of UFBa, who was in the United States for collaboration in research, data referring to the two recently discovered asteroids. Professor Kleber kindly responded to the request by sending a correspondence with a Minor Planet Electronic Circular (MPEC) publication from May 1 of that year, with astronomical data pointing out that on April 23, 1996 the asteroid called 1993 HA2 was at an mean planetary distance of 24.74 AU from the center of the Sun and that DW2 at a mean distance of 25.03 AU; these asteroids were later named with the respective names Nessus and Hylonom.