Early Earth got an injection of heavy metal

• Autores: Jesse Emspak
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3155, 2017, pág. 9
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Leftovers from the moon's formation may have tunneled to Earth's core, and make up far more of people's planet than they once thought. Four-and-a-half billion years ago, when Earth had barely cooled off from its initial formation, a world the size of Mars collided with Earth and sent debris mostly from the mantle into space. This formed the moon. For the next few hundred million years after that other large bodies kept smacking into Earth. Some of those were so large they had their own iron cores. Using known models of impacts Simone Marchi at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder and his team simulated the after-effects of these large impacts and found that much of the time, the core material of the body smashing into the planet was either flung into space or tunneled straight to the Earth's core.