Collision with another planet could allow for life on earth
Country you A walk today may not be the same planet born before 4.5 billion years ago. Many scientists believe that the country has collided in their infants with another world of Mars, and that instead of being destroyed, it is transformed, which includes the mass of that foreign body to become the planet we know. Recent research adds another layer of relevance to that hypothelicated cosmic event: scientists believe that without that other body, the basic conditions for life on earth may never appear.
The team from the University of Switzerland claims that, due to its proximity, the proto-country that existed before this potential collision lost the volatile elements that are essential to form complex molecules. Every hydrogen, carbon or sulfur, their analysis suggests, evaporates in the first three million years after proto-earth formation. And so the country has evolved without external entries, they say, would probably be the dry world, hosting on the development of complex life.
On the other hand, if the body is formed in the periphery of the solar system – a region that produces heavy waters and other volatile elements – and then hit the rocky planet such as proto-chemical wealth, which is characterized by our planet today, even after the initial aggressive evaporation process. This hypothesis coincides with other proposals that indicate an alien origin of water, according to which icy meteorites bombed the primitive country and put their molecules.
In the studio published in sciences, researchers have precisely measured the radioactive decay of two isotopes, Manganese-53 to Hrom-53, in both terrestrial patterns and meteoretic fragments on Earth. Since these spaceships are formed at the same time as the sun and planets of the solar system, analyzing traces of them and their composition is equivalent to opening a time capsule from the past. By calculating the radioactive decay of Mangan-53, the researchers discovered a point in time when the planets stopped sharing the material with their surroundings and fixed the chemical elements that would retain forever.
Their results show that Proto-Earth sealed its elements only three million years after the birth of the solar system. Moreover, they found that the ratio of the early planet manganese to chromium was very low, suggesting that the proto-earth is an extremely hot world, capable of ejection manganese. Since this element is less volatile than other important elements, such as hydrogen, carbon or sulfur, and you have also avoided.
“Thanks to our results, Proto-Earth was a dry rocky planet in the beginning. It was only a collision with ThEI, and fully brought life,” the first author of the report said in the Unizmetula in the Bern Press Release.
Theia was the name of the hypothetical body that the proto-country passed about 4.5 billion years. Researchers believe that the influence will occur between 30 and 100 million years after the start of the solar system – it is, several tens of millions of years after the ancestor of our planet was a very dry world.
However, the arrival of water and other volatile elements is not equated with the immediate phenomenon of life. Only water does not produce life, but creates a much more favorable chemical and physical environment for other molecules and, with them, biological processes that are substrates. In that sense, Theia set the stage, but did not set fire to the spark.
This story originally appeared Wired In Spanish And he was translated from Spanish.