The mysteries of the world can’t be solved with only the Earth itself. We need to look outside to see what it really is and how it came to be. Scientists at NASA and geophysicists at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris want to know more answers about this blue planet than it has to offer. From its surface to the deepest depths of its unmarked territories, the planet hides more than we can imagine. The core is yet one of its marvels that we have never gotten a chance to look at firsthand.
The planets in our solar system have all been created through rocks and pebbles accretion. The planet Venus, however, is roughly the same as our planet Earth, but with more heat and no water. It is said that both the planets are twins and the result came out opposite.
“Venus and Earth are kind of the ultimate control case,” says Sue Smrekar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We don’t fully understand how Earth ended up so habitable and Venus so uninhabitable.”
The researchers were forced to look to the skies for help since it is near to impossible to look through the Earth without the help of some super x-ray vision to help us with. The universe and firstly our solar system includes a multitude of asteroids and planeloads that can help us learn about our planet.
The process of the formation of a planet begins after a protoplanetary disk comes into existence and bits of rocks and dust circling the orbit join in and collide and stick together. This causes the planet to rapidly grow and become a sphere.
However, scientists know that this phenomenon does happen to gas giants as the gas and the friction as a result causes the rocks and the pebbles to hurtle small particles and allowing them to form a planet. This year researchers may find some clues this year when NASA’s Juno mission which reached Jupiter this year and will send information.
The materials in Jupiter will help with the planetary accretion models.
If Jupiter has a small core, classical accretion might have been able to build it up fast enough; if it’s big, it might imply that something like pebble accretion took place instead, he says.
Understanding Jupiter will help researchers know more about Earth. Until we don’t know about our planets in the solar system. We wouldn’t know a hospitable one from a barren one.
“We have telescopes in space that are hunting Earth-sized planets around other stars, but we have no clue if a planet will evolve into a Venus or into an Earth,” he says. “And that’s the whole ball game, at some level.”
