Earth was born faster than expected

The Earth formed faster than expected: its embryo developed in just 5 million years within the cloud of gas and dust that surrounded the Sun. That is, by reducing the 4.6 billion years of history of the Solar System in just 24 hours, the first sketch of the Earth would have formed in the first minute and a half. The research published by the University of Copenhagen in the Science Advances magazine indicates this.

The theory so far believed that the Earth would have formed over tens of millions of years as a result of an accretion process: a period comparable to 5-15 minutes on the 24-hour scale. According to the research coordinator, Martin Schiller, the result would indicate that the formation of the planets is more frequent than expected. For this reason it would be interesting to evaluate whether similar processes take place around other stars of the Milky Way.

Supporting the new hypothesis are the measures relating to different types of meteorites. In particular, iron isotopes have been studied, i.e. atoms of the same element with a different mass. Thus it emerged that only one type of meteorite has a composition similar to that of Earth: they are the so-called CI chondrites.

These very primitive little celestial bodies would be the most ancient witnesses of the environment in which the Sun was immersed when he was still very young. The analogies found in the data relating to the composition of the Earth lead to speculate that the embryo of our planet was also born in the same period.

Understanding how the planets of the Solar System were formed also allows us to understand how often water accumulates, notes the research co-author, Martin Bizzarro. Finally, considering that chondrites contain water inside them, it would become more likely to find it elsewhere in the universe.