![]() ![]() " in turn will help us to understand both the Earth's history as a habitable planet and the evolution of exoplanets around other stars." "This lays the groundwork to be able to predict the atmospheric erosion from any giant impact, which would feed in to models of planet formation as a whole," Kegerreis said in the statement. Their findings, published on July 15 in the Astrophysical Journal, offer insight on planet formation in the early universe, as well as the aftermath of giant impacts. "At the moment, it appears that the amount of atmosphere a planet loses due to these collisions depends upon how lucky or unlucky they are in terms the type of the impact they suffer," Vincent Eke, co-author of the study and a cosmologist at Durham University, said in the statement. The new simulations suggest that this event may have stolen between 10% and 50% of early Earth's atmosphere. ![]() The debris from this impact accumulated in orbit around Earth to form our moon. In fact, according to the statement, a direct hit could destroy not just a planet's entire atmosphere but even some of its mantle as well, the layer beneath a planet's crust.Įarth's moon is believed to have formed about 4.5 billion years ago following a grazing impact of a small planet about the size Mars with Earth. The simulations suggest a slow, grazing impact causes less atmospheric loss than a fast, head-on collision. ![]()
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