Cosmic rays precursors of planets with life.

in Popular STEMyesterday

Cosmic rays precursors of planets with life.




A latest investigation came out on December 10 that is very curious, because we have always said that supernovae exterminate entire planets, but they can also help create life on planets, in short, a bath of cosmic rays from a past supernova allowed planets similar to Earth to emerge.


This research creates a supernova immersion model that suggests that planets similar to ours are more common in the universe, which is good news and therefore increases the possibility of planets with life, like what is here on Earth.


The authors propose a new model that would explain the origin of radionuclides, these are unstable radioactive isotopes with short lives of a few thousand years to a few hundred thousand years and we now know that they were present in the primitive solar system 4.6 billion years ago, we know this indirectly through their decay byproducts, other isotopes that are products of when these previous ones break up and that are more stable and we have found them in primitive meteorites.


The point is that, according to this research, at the beginning of the solar system, when the planetesimals were being formed, that is, the building blocks of the planets, those bodies from a few kilometers in diameter to about 100 to 200 km in diameter, is the size in which magnetic and other types of forces, which are those that join the small specks of dust in an asteroid, begin to act from 1 km to 2 km in diameter, gravity begins to act as a force of union of all that material and up to about 500 km in diameter, because there gravity is when it begins to generate that spherical shape typical of planets.




From approximately 500 km in diameter, gravity begins to give a spherical shape to the objects of the cosmos and also to differentiate the materials, the heavier materials go to the center, the planetesimals would be in that margin and at the origin, even before the planets were formed, it seems that a supernova exploded near the solar system in formation, as close as only 3.2 light years away and this is what caused ultra-heavy elements to be injected into the solar system directly through in addition to a rain of cosmic rays.


That would have to be bad for the health of any planet with life, but for the formation of planets at that time it was not great, because those radioactive elements generate heat and that heat melted the planetesimals that had frozen elements and allowed water and other volatiles to escape from the temperate zone where the rocky planets were forming, in this way, what was later gathered in the area where the Earth or Venus or Mars was were planetesimals but dry, because the material like water and other volatiles had escaped to colder areas.


This may sound a bit bad because the Earth has oceans and it is wonderful for us humans and all forms of life that water exists, but if we compare the Earth with other worlds in our own solar system, the Earth is an arid desert, it has very little water if we compare it with, for example, the moons of Jupiter, except IO, which is a volcanic moon, but all the others have much more water than there is on Earth, in fact, yes Ganymede, for example, Moon of Jupiter or Europa, we brought it a little closer to where Mars is and it began to heat up, what we would have would be oceanic planets, worlds surrounded by a global ocean perhaps more than 100 km deep and if that supernova explosion had not occurred, without those radioactive elements that melted that primordial water that was in the area where the Earth was, the Earth would now be an oceanic world with a global ocean of dozens kilometers deep.


Life would have arisen, perhaps, but obviously beings like us would not have arisen, we would be an octopus, a squid, we would be completely different.




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