This one-page comic story published on
Race to the Moon #2, that is now in public domain, is referred to an old theory proposed by
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers, a german astronomer:
His bold hypothesis of their origin by the disruption of a primitive large planet, although now discarded, received countenance from the finding of Juno by Harding, and of Vesta by himself, in the precise regions of Cetus and Virgo where the nodes of such supposed planetary fragments should be situated.
The hypothetical planet, instead of Polis like suggested in the comic, was named
Phaeton by
Yevgeny Leonidovich Krinov. Olbers' model is today substituted by the
accretion model.
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