Are you interested in knowing something funny? We don't know what happened to our planet. The general idea is broad, but the details are difficult to understand.
We have a model that is currently accepted as the most likely explanation for Earth's formation. There are some facts that are difficult to explain.
A new paper shows a new formation pathway that is more in line with the characteristics of Earth.
The Earth is thought to have formed fromchondritic asteroids. Paolo Sossi said that the blocks of rock and metal formed early on in the Solar System.
The problem with this theory is that no mixture of these chondrites can explain the composition of the Earth, which is much poorer in light, volatile elements such as hydrogen and helium.
Scientists have been able to piece together a general picture of the planet formation process despite a lot of questions. When a star forms from a dense clump of matter in a cloud of dust and gas in space, the material around it arranges into a disk that moves into the star.
Small densities within that swirl also aggregate into smaller, cooler clumps, because of the disk of dust and gas. Small particles collide and form larger and larger objects that can eventually become a planet. Observational evidence supports the accretion model.
If the rocks arechondrites, there is an open question about the missing volatile elements.
Some of the lighter elements could have been destroyed by the heat generated during the collision.
According to recent experimental work led by Sossi, heat would have caused lighter isotopes of elements to be destroyed. Lighter isotopes are similar to those found in chondrites.
There is a chance that the rocks that made Earth were not chondritic asteroids but planetesimals. The seeds of planets that have grown large enough to have a differentiated core are called larger bodies.
We can see that the planets in our Solar System formed slowly. Sossi said that small grains grew into kilometer-sized planets by accumulating more and more material.
Planetesimals that formed in different areas around the young Sun can have very different chemical compositions.
They ran N-body simulations, altering variables such as the number of planetesimals, along the "Grand Tack" scenario, in which a baby Jupiter moves first closer to the Sun, and then back again.
Jupiter's motion in the early Solar System caused the smaller rocks to scatter into the inner disk.
The simulations were designed to create the inner Solar System. A mixture of planetesimals with different chemical compositions could reproduce Earth as we know it today. The most probable outcome of the simulations was Earth.
Understanding the different compositions of the rocky planets in the Solar System could have important implications for other planetary systems outside the solar system.
This result was very remarkable even though we had suspected it. Sossi said that we now have a mechanism that explains the formation of the Earth, as well as a reference to explain the formation of the other rocky planets.
When trying to understand planetary formation, it's important to consider both dynamics and chemistry. I hope that our findings will lead to better collaboration between researchers.
The research was published in a journal.
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