Last year, researchers from Sweden and Denmark suggested in a study published in the scientific journal Science Advances that our planet was formed from pebbles, some of which were sucked together in a celestial body for millions of years. According to this “pebble theory”, as it has come to be called in the scientific world, our world was initially a small planet consisting of ice and coal. When it grew to about one percent of its current mass, the atmosphere became warm enough for the ice to evaporate and destroy organic molecules along with the carbon. Then the Earth began to attract millimeter-sized pebbles from different parts of the solar system, until these pebbles ran out. With this groundbreaking explanation of the origin of the Earth, scientists were able to show that our planet arose much faster than previously thought.
Our model shows that the Earth formed over five million years. Then the gravel ran out. Astronomy professor Anders Johansen, affiliated with Lund University and the University of Copenhagen, said in a press release last year.
Earth can become a superhero
A research team from Lund, Copenhagen and Zhejiang in China has published a new study that sheds new light on space dust and its role in the formation of the Earth, while strengthening the previous “pebble theory”.
“Through advanced computer simulations, we can demonstrate that Earth was formed by a mixture of pebbles and dust from supernova explosions in the outer solar system, as well as dust from the inner solar system which contains much less dust than supernovae,” says Lund. Professor Anders Johansen in a press release.
Astronomers have concluded that Jupiter has not turned off as much dust from supernovae, that is, exploding stars, as the scientific world had previously believed.
– Despite its size, Planet Hades may not have blocked all the dust particles from the outer solar system. A great deal has advanced and contributed to the formation of the Earth, says Michael Lamprechts, an astronomy researcher at Lund University, in a press release.
At the same time, Jupiter was crucial to life on Earth. Scientists believe that without this planet, Earth would most likely have evolved into a so-called super-Earth with significantly greater mass and an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, where nothing could survive.
New discoveries about the origin of the Earth can help us understand how much water and carbon – or in other words, the conditions for the origin of life – with which a planet is born.
By learning more about these complex processes, we are gaining an increasing understanding of how things work when habitable planets also form around other stars in the universe, places that could hold life, says Anders Johansen.
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