Martian canal low for liquid water to exist on the surface; and he pointed out that several recent efforts to find evidence of water vapor in the Martian atmosphere with spectroscopic analysis had failed. He concluded that complex life was impossible, let alone the planet-girding irrigation system claimed by Lowell. The influential observer Eugène Antoniadi used the 83-cm (32.6 inch) aperture telescope at Meudon Observatory at the 1909 opposition of Mars and saw no canals, the outstanding photos of Mars taken at the new Baillaud dome at the Pic du Midi observatory also brought formal discredit to the Martian canals theory in
Phaeton (hypothetical planet) the protoplanetary disk, and in this region the incorporation of protoplanetary remnants into the planets was prevented by large gravitational perturbations induced by Jupiter during the formative period of the solar system. Some scientists and non-scientists continue to advocate for the existence and destruction of a Phaeton-like planet. Zecharia Sitchin suggested that the goddess known to the Sumerians as Tiamat in fact relates to a planet that was destroyed by a rogue planet known as Nibiru, creating both Earth and the asteroid belt. His work is widely regarded as pseudoscience. The astronomer and author Tom Van Flandern held that Phaeton