Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
More than 4,500 million years ago, Earth began to form from a mixture of dust and gas that hovered around our young Sun. Over time, it grew to resemble the planet we live on today, a process that a new study published in the journal Nature, would have happened much faster than previously thought. Instead of 100 million years, the formation of the Earth would have taken three million years. Viewed from the astronomical scale, this makes a radical difference.
But this is not the only controversial finding by experts from the University of Copenhagen. According to them, water would have been present on Earth since its creation and would not have arrived, as was thought until now, to our planet through icy comets. If this is true, it would mean that the chances of water on other worlds are much higher – and with it extraterrestrial life.
To explain this rapid genesis of the Earth, scientists propose the pebble accumulation theory. Based on what we know so far, planets are born from a disk of dust and gas. Upon reaching a certain size, they quickly attract, like a vacuum cleaner, small stones. Through some of these icy pebbles, water would have reached Earth, being involved in our planet since its inception. This process would have taken much less time than the formation of the Earth according to current theory, which claims that our world would have been created through a sequence of asteroid collisions that got progressively larger and larger – a process that would take many more millions. of years.
Paradigm shift or controversial theory?
The theory of the accumulation of pebbles for the formation of the Earth is controversial. Although it is already used to explain how gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn formed, scientists question whether this can also be applied to terrestrial planets like Earth.
What led scientists to seek a new explanation for the formation of the Earth? Analyzing silicon isotopes from more than 60 meteorites and near-Earth planetary bodies that could be seen as remnants of the formation process, the researchers were able to determine how the different blocks that formed the earth were assembled and develop a new time scale. His conclusion was that the Earth had to have formed much faster than we previously thought.
If this new theory is confirmed, it could radically change the paradigm of life on Earth. And it is that then, our planet would have been created like many others, and the chances of finding life on other planets would increase significantly.
Keep reading:
• Synthetic human embryos are created for the first time in a laboratory without eggs or sperm
• Remains of a giant ancient oceanic reptile, known as an ichthyosaur, found on a remote Arctic island
• Scientists find in England a giant footprint of a carnivorous dinosaur that lived 166 million years ago