Antarctica Yields Relics of a Dwarf Planet from Creation of Solar System

www.dailygalaxy.com...

Quote from source:
Rocks can be many things: they were probably our earliest weapons, they've been ballast on our journeys of exploration, even modern-art pieces. But a pair recovered from Antarctica may be the grandest application yet - tombstones for an entire world. Lunar and Planetary Institute researcher Allain Treiman believes that them to be pieces of a destroyed dwarf planet, relics from the creation of the solar system.

It's relevant to questions so important that most adults don't think to ask them - why are there only eight planets? Or nine, or however many there are now? Why are they where they are? Because of all the objects that formed during the birth of the solar system, the ones we see are the ones that survived. It's likely that many small proto-planets formed as the stellar dusts condensed into larger bodies - some collided and merged, some may have been pinballed out of the system by the varying gravitational fields, and it seems that some got smashed to bits in the confusion. The existence of the asteroid belt supports such planetary pile-ups - but we can look at these antarctic rocks much closer.


Mineral analysis of the fragments reveals a large concentration of feldspar - large enough to have needed a planet to create it. You might not think of rocks as hot and runny (unless you're the Human Torch), but when you gather enough of anything together the pressure and heat provided by gravity will melt it. Materials of different densities float to different heights (just like oil in water), and as the system cools these differentiated layers are frozen in. If you hang around for a while you have a hard shell around a layered liquid core, like our own Earth, and eventually the entire system solidifies, like the Moon. If you lose a fight with another extremely solid body you get blown to pieces - but each of those pieces still shows evidence of the layer-cake structure.

I love these kind of finds. Amazing, and am glad we have educated people looking for this type of stuff.

I absolutely think that there could have been another planets around here at some point. Everything around us is a remnant of a supernova. If there was a star that was that big to think that a planet could not have been around it would be bad science.

And to think that there would have only been planets that we see now would be wrong too. scientists think that the asteroid belt would have been a planet before and scientists also think that our moon was created by a dwarf planet colliding with ours. To me this makes perfect sense.

Any thoughts?

Pred...

edit for speeling.

[edit on 1-3-2010 by predator0187]

I don't see how they concluded the metamorphic rock came from a dwarf planet. I'm sure you could find loads of Feldspar at Yosemite National Park too. But if you're looking for proof we're born of a supernova then that comes from the levels of the heavier elements that only form in second and third generation stars.

reply to post by Crito

The samples did not come from Earth. They are meteorites. That's what makes it interesting. For some reason the article does not mention that.


[edit on 3/1/2010 by Phage]