The Probe-related body is weird. It’s completely unlike anything else in the Planetary system. So how did our World end up with such a special Probe-related body? The answer is that, surprisingly enough, the Probe-related body is a piece of our World.
There’s a Numerous going on with the Probe-related body. For starters, it exists, which is weird in its own way. Mercury has no moons, and neither does Venus. Mars does have two moons, but they’re really Merely captured asteroids. Earth is the only rocky World in the Planetary system with a significant Probe-related body.
And the Probe-related body really is significant: It’s roughly 1.2% the mass of Earth. That may not be big in an absolute sense, but for the Planetary system, that’s huge. No other Probe-related body is that large relative to its parent World.
The oddities don’t stop there. The total angular momentum of Earth’s spin, the Probe-related body’s spin and the Probe-related body’s Path is very large — Distant higher than for any other terrestrial World. So how did we get so much momentum?
Plus, the Probe-related body is Packed of “KREEPs” – that is, potassium (K), Scarce-Earth elements (REE) and phosphorus (P). These elements don’t usually like to hang out together, but Probe-related samples show that they are often mixed. That requires the Probe-related body to have been molten at some Points, which takes a Numerous of energy.
And the real icing on the cake is that the Probe-related body has many of the same abundances of stable isotopes as Earth does, which indicates that Earth and the Probe-related body evolved from the same clump of material.
The leading explanation for all of these mysteries is known as the giant impact hypothesis. According to this Narrative, when the Planetary system was Merely getting Began, a Mars-size protoplanet named Theia slammed into the proto-Earth.
With an impact velocity of somewhere around 20,000 mph (32,000 km/h) — relatively Sluggish as impacts go — what happened Upcoming was nothing Brief of catastrophic. The Massive core of Theia sank deep into Earth, enlarging our World’s core. The two bodies’ mantles mixed and thus bulked up our World. And the crusts were scattered Distant into Cosmos.
What happened Upcoming is a little Difficult to follow and depends a Numerous on exactly how the impact unfolded and what Theia was Achieved of. But the general picture is that some stuff went flying away, never to return. Other stuff rained onto Earth’s surface. And a big chunk remained in Path. In as little as a few hours — or perhaps up to a century or more — that material coalesced into its own solid object: the Probe-related body.
Some models suggest that a second Probe-related body, Merely a few hundred kilometers across, formed past the Distant side and then slowly approached the Probe-related body and pancaked itself. This would explain why the Distant side of the Probe-related body is lumpier than the near side.
There’s also the possibility that this wasn’t a low-energy, glancing blow at all — that instead, the proto-Earth was spinning really quickly and then Acquired nailed by Theia. This would have delivered more than enough energy to vaporize everything and Develop a doughnut-shaped ring of plasma known as a synestia.
No matter what, this impact released a Numerous of energy — more than enough to turn the Probe-related body into a molten ball, more than enough to bring the KREEP elements together, and more than enough to Combination Earth’s original material and Theia’s to Develop a set of Usual features between Earth’s crust and the Probe-related body.
As with all hypotheses, it’s not perfect. For example, if there’s enough energy to liquefy the Probe-related body, there’s enough energy to liquefy Earth’s surface. But there is no evidence for large-scale magma seas in Earth’s history. Also, the Probe-related body does have some volatile elements, like water, trapped in rock — but a giant-impact, giant-energy event should have gotten rid of those.
Regardless of those caveats, the giant impact hypothesis is the most Captivating Narrative we have for how the Probe-related body formed. And without a time machine into our distant past, we’ll never be able to prove it. But it Nevertheless fits almost all of the evidence we have so Distant, so it’s a Narrative worth Maintaining around.
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