Many experts believe that Earth likely collided with a small planet not long after Earth's formation. Now a team has proposed that huge sections of planet Theia remain pooled in the Earth's mantle.
Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsAn ancient planet named Theia collided with Earth some 4.5 billion years ago and left large amounts of its iron-rich material embedded in our planet, according to a new study.
Researchers first identified the material by studying seismic waves, which travel more slowly in the denser material. The continent-sized deposits lie beneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean and are each about twice the size of the moon.As dramatic as it may sound, our collision with a wayward, Mars-sized planet is the best-accepted theory for the origin of the moon.
The team’s convection models showed that blobs “tens of kilometers” in size would have sunk into Earth and piled up in the lower mantle, where they still amount to about 2 percent of Earth’s mass.Because of the lower mantle’s relative coolness, the blobs fell like globs of paraffin wax in a lava lamp, instead of mixing like colors in a can of paint. The material’s unusual density – somewhere between 2 and 3.
This isn’t the first time someone has connected the high-density blobs to Theia, Robin Canup, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, toldWhen Did Theia Collide With Earth?concluded that Earth was a mere 100 million years old when it collided with Theia and tore free the material that formed the moon.
But not all scientists agree this is how the moon came to be as it may have formed from the same cloud of gas and dust that filled the early solar system. Or it may have formed elsewhere and fell into Earth’s gravity well.
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