Earth you Walk on Today may not be the same planet that was born 4.5 billion years ago. Many scientists believe that in infancy, the Earth collided with another world of Mars’s size and that instead of being destroyed, it has been transformed, covering the mass of this foreign body to become a planet we know. Recent studies add another layer of importance for this hypothesis space event: scientists believe that without this other body the basic living conditions on Earth could never appear.
The team from the University of Bern in Switzerland claims that due to its proximity to the sun, the proto-earth that existed before the potential collision, lost volatile elements necessary to create complicated molecules. All hydrogen, coal or sulfur suggests their analysis, evaporated in just the first 3 million years after the creation of a proto-earth. And so, if the earth has evolved without external cartridges, they say that it would probably be a more arid world, more hostile to the development of a complicated life.
On the other hand, if the body formed on the outskirts of the solar system, which produces rocks with profuse water and other unstable elements-then it hit a rocky planet, such as proto-ziemia, it could provide a strange chemical wealth that characterizes our planet, even after the initial aggressive process of transition to earth. This hypothesis coincides with other proposals indicating extraterrestrial origin of water, according to which ice meteorites bombarded primitive soil and deposited their particles.
In a study published in Scientific progressScientists precisely measured the radioactive breakdown of two isotopes, manganese-53 to Chrome-53, both in land samples and meteorite fragments located on Earth. Because these cosmic rocks were created at the same time as the sun and planets of the Solar System, analyzing their traces and their composition is equivalent to opening a time capsule from the past. Calculating the radioactive distribution of manganese-53, scientists revealed the moment when the planets stopped replacing the material with the environment and repaired the chemical elements that would retain forever.
Their results show that Proto-Earth sealed its elements only 3 million years after the birth of the Solar System. In addition, they discovered that the ratio of the early chromium planets was very low, which suggests that proto-maria was an extremely warm world, capable of exploring manganese. Because this element is less volatile than other major elements, such as hydrogen, coal or sulfur, they also had to escape.
“Thanks to our results, we know that the proto-runs were initially a dry rocky planet. It can therefore be assumed that it was only a collision with Theia that brought unstable elements to the ground and eventually enabled life,” said Pascal Kruttasch, the first author of the report, said at the University of Bern press release.
Theia is the name of a hypothetical body that thought that she had hit the proto-Ziemia about 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists believe that the impact would occur from 30 to 100 million years after the beginning of the Solar System – that is, a few tens of millions of years after the ancestor of our planet was known as a very arid world.
However, the arrival of water and other unstable elements is not synonymous with the immediate appearance of life. The water itself does not produce life, but creates a much more favorable chemical and physical environment for other molecules, and with them biological processes underlying cells. In this sense, Theia prepared the stage, but did not delicate the spark.
This story originally appeared Wired in Spanish and was translated from Spanish.