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Planet Crash That Made Moon Left Key Elements For Life On Earth, Scientists Say
Scientists are claiming the cosmic collision that made the moon left a host of elements behind on Earth that were crucial for life to emerge. The Guardian reports: The impact 4.4 billion years ago is thought to have occurred when an itinerant planet the size of Mars slammed into the fledgling Earth, scattering a shower of rocks into space. The debris later coalesced into the moon. Beyond an act that shaped the sky, the smash-up transferred essential elements to the Earth's surface, meaning that most of the carbon and nitrogen that makes up our bodies probably came from the passing planet, the researchers believe.
Petrologists at Rice University in Texas reached their conclusions after running experiments on geochemical reactions under the high temperatures and pressures found deep inside a planet. They wanted to understand whether Earth acquired key elements from meteorites that slammed into Earth or through some other ancient route. Lead author Damanveer Grewal found that a planet with a sulphur-rich core would have large fractions of carbon and nitrogen on its surface. Such a planet could transfer that volatile material to Earth in just the right proportions if it happened to clatter into it, the researchers found, after modeling a billion different cosmic scenarios in a computer and comparing them to conditions seen in the solar system today. The research is published in Science Advances.
Petrologists at Rice University in Texas reached their conclusions after running experiments on geochemical reactions under the high temperatures and pressures found deep inside a planet. They wanted to understand whether Earth acquired key elements from meteorites that slammed into Earth or through some other ancient route. Lead author Damanveer Grewal found that a planet with a sulphur-rich core would have large fractions of carbon and nitrogen on its surface. Such a planet could transfer that volatile material to Earth in just the right proportions if it happened to clatter into it, the researchers found, after modeling a billion different cosmic scenarios in a computer and comparing them to conditions seen in the solar system today. The research is published in Science Advances.
Maybe that was it.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
If such collisions are rare, a possible explanation for the Fermi paradox is that life is so rare that we may be the firsrt.
No need for things like intelligence almost always self-destroys, etc.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So God-did-it! I mean it was aliens. Alien gods?
Table-ized A.I.
When they come to use their planet, we're doomed. Look what we did to it.
Also in that issue of Science Advances, Alzheimerâ(TM)s is caused by bacteria in your teeth. Yes, caused by. Not kidding, the bacteria releases cytotoxic vesicles that fragment the neural tau proteins.
What kind of trajectory would lead to such a crash?
It seems like that planet coming from the solar system itself would be unlikely, since it would have to have a vastly different speed and/or direction in any case.
Even if they spiraled towards each other, the crash would be more or a bump than something thet can cause that much debris.
And if it got redirected e.g. by Jupiter, it also still would have to form far enough and have a speed different enough to bring it close to Jupiter at the right time.
I know: Unlikely things happen all the time, and Occam's razor is usually misunderstood (it only means you should look for the likely first, not that you should exclude or dismiss the unlikely).
Is this just one of those supet-unlikely things that just happened anyway?
Indeed. Probably reduces the likelihood by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Actually depending on the size of the black hole, the event horizon can be quite far away from it. I think Stanislav Lem did the math once in a story and a planet with live was just behind the edge of it.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
There's a touch of poetry in that.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
We are star dust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The Giant Impact Hypothesis became popular with the experts because it explained why the compositions of the Earth an Moon are so similar. The major problem with it (at the time) was such a collision would blast an enormous amount of the planets into an orbiting cloud of debris and a whole lot of the lighter elements and compounds (like water) would be lost to space. It's estimated that such a collision would heat Earth's surface to over 500 C, maybe over 1000C. It would "only" take 50 or 100 million years (maybe less) to cool and the debris cloud wouldn't be stable for long. I don't understand why, but that's what they say. So, they're left with a primordial heating as it coalesces/compresses (also some radioactive heating) and some cooling then the impact and whoops, so long atmosphere, so long water! So, thats why theres so much interest in missions to asteroids and comets, we are trying to get evidence showing which (if either) of those types of things "re-fertilized" the surface here with water. I don't recall where I read it but for at least hundreds of years after the collision, the debris would rain down on the Earth like Zeus's wrath. (or maybe Vulkan). The atmosphere would be unsurvivable until the bombardment mostly stopped. One of the puzzles about Earth's surface is why there are so many heavier elements on it. When it was molten, the heavier elements should have sunk down to the core (or mantle) and all the fun stuff (Iron, Copper, Zinc, Silver, Gold, Titanium, Uranium...) would only be present in closer to trace amounts. So, IF the collision with Theia happened, and IF Theia (or Earth) had enough "inner" stuff blasted into space, it dropping back down onto the surface is one possible explanation. The GIE fits the best of all the ideas but it does have some critics and they do have evidence which seems to suggest it is wrong. The problem is that the GIE is "tuned" in terms of when it happened - since it had to be before life appeared (maybe 3.4 billion years ago (bya) (although some evidence pegs the first evidence (not fossils, but isotopic 'signatures' of biocarbon in zircons) at over 4 bya. The hypothesis should be taken with a huge grain of salt; it may be right or it may not. Usually for a 'popular' idea to go dark, the evidence against it builds up and eventually no one who isn't a "true believer" finds its explanatory power credible. So far, that's not happened with the GIE, so it's not in trouble. But it is just one of the ideas floating around. Also the "need" for the heavy metals and carbon is because the geological carbon cycle removes it from the surface. (although plate tectonics is believed to not exist 4+bya, so I have to ask: ok, so its been ~4.5 billion years since the GIE, and carbon is still around. So, what was different before it that would cause the giant sucking sound and 'eat' all the carbon which isn't happening today? 4.6-4.3 bya is ~300 million years and it's been 10 times that since the GIE (hypothetically) - explain the enormous difference. All I can guess is that the molten newborn Earth must have acted differently than the hot surface right after the GIE. I'm not sure I buy it. Its like the studies which use heavy metal catalysts for synthetic abiogenesis, The hypothesis required metal catalysts, and they should have been relatively rare on the surface, so how do you explain them being then. There's way too much hand-waving for me to have any confidence that they're probably on the right track, but at least fleshing out the model gives it an ever increasing target to take pot-shots at.
Very Nice Article. Please keeping posting.
Meme in 3, 2, 1, ....
I have no opinion about the source of the orbital circularity, but the synchronous rotation and revolution of the moon are a predictable result of tidal force between the two bodies. It's the same force driving the moon farther from the Earth every year. Same reason mercury keeps the same face to the sun. Tides.
Does anyone else find it funny that scientists expect us to believe they know what happened 4.4 billion years ago when, with all their scientific academia, scientists can't reliability tell me what the weather is going to be like next weekend?
The better title.... "Moon Crash in to Earth Allows Life", and being that I am a scientist... I also say it.
Have you ever seen a planet just floating along and hit another one?
Let me think about that for a sec.
Have gnu, will travel.
b) universal distances are vast, and warp drives aren't practical or even possible. As such, other intelligent aliens can't reach us, or even communicate with us.
They don't have to reach us to be detected. There's this thing called "radio" - kind of a low-frequency starlight - which spreads out just like it and is very easy to notice (if not always to decode correctly).
The fermi paradox is based on the idea that intelligent life achieving technology is almost certain to develop and use radio, and that said radio will leak out into the rest of the universe. At the time Fermi proposed it, I hear that our planet emitted more such energy into space in some bands than typical stars.
My personal explanation, if intelligent technological life is reasonably common, is this: As technology advances, modulation schemes such as spread-spectrum and OFDM are developed. These squeeze far more information through a given amount of bandwidth than the blaring foghorns of CW, AM, and FM. But the more bandwidth-efficient the modulation becomes, the closer it approximates pure noise.
You'll notice that, though broadcast AM and FM audio are still with us (though we're starting to convert FM), the big foghorn - television - has already switched from two big carr
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You'll notice that, though broadcast AM and FM audio are still with us (though we're starting to convert FM), the big foghorn - television - has already switched from two big carriers (one giant AM with a subcarrier on the modulation, one FM just like an FM radio station) to a digital schemes based on OFDM 8VSB, or the like. Lower power and very noise-like.
So intelligent life might be detectable by radio, not from the rise of technology onward, but only during the century or so between the development of radio and its disappearance into the noise of efficent computation-intensive systems.
This would give the same result as the "intelligence tends to wipe itself out in a century or so" hypothesis, leaving detection dependent on actual space probe visits or deliberate attempts on their part to transmit an identifiable signal.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Depends on its size. Too little gravity and it would have been lost.
You could just actually look the subject up, read some recent material, and know something rather than gas in ignorance. There are these cool things called "The Internet" and "Google", you should give them a try.
No one is going to "show" you something. You have to look.
Try this - find an actual recent scientific paper on the subject, read it, and if you disagree, post a link here are your specific criticisms about it.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The thing is, we don't know that any of those is crucial. Or whether it's all of them. And most of them are of uncertain frequency. Which makes computing probability guesswork.
One is all we're certain of, but it could be as high as 1 in every 500 stars and we'd never know...without going to look.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
We're it, or rather the Earth and the Moon are what remain of the two bodies that collided.
I suspect its carbon and nitrogen were locked in its core. So no. It took the collision to get C and N up to the surface, at least that's the theory.
You shouldn't assume that the moon is like your head.