Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, much quicker than scientists previously thought. Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass of Earth.
The study supports a 20-year-old theory that Mars remained small because it avoided collisions with planetary building material.
The new finding is published in the journal Nature.
In our early Solar System, well before planets had formed, a frisbee-shaped cloud of gas and dust encircled the Sun.
Scientists believe that the planets grew from material pulled together by electrostatic charges – the same force that’s behind the “dust bunnies” under your bed.
These proto-planetary dust balls grew and grew until they formed what scientists term “embryo” planets.
These rocky masses were large enough to exert a considerable gravitational force on surrounding material, including other nascent planets.
Nudging each other with their gravitational fields, the embryos were often thrown from their regular orbits, sometimes into the path of another large rocky mass.
If collisions occurred, these nascent planets were either expelled from the Solar System or shattered into pieces. These pieces were often combined to form a larger planet. In fact, the Earth’s Moon is thought to be the result of an embryo planet colliding with our own planet.
By modelling this process, astro-physicists can determine the size of planets they expect to form at a given distance from the Sun. Mars is an outlier; it should have grown to around the size of the Earth, but remains about one-tenth its size.
Because of Mars’ small size, many scientists have long suspected that the Red Planet avoided the collisions that allowed other neighbouring planets to increase their girth.
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