Chunks of Failed Planet Might Have Disfigured Earth: Astronomers Suggest

Some 4 million years ago, Earth, Sun, Moon, and the entire solar system were assaulted by a suite of asteroid attackers. At that time, the planetary system was juvenile and uncultivated, and the attack of the asteroid assailants pummeled the entire cosmological system. Since long, it has been assumed that the assault was mainly caused by the asteroids, which in these days are called the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’. Till now, space rocks are soaring in the region of the asteroid belt flanked by Mars and Jupiter.

But now scientists have come up with a new theory, which suggested the involvement of some other factors in the biggest crash of the solar system. As suggested by the scientists in their new theory, Earth, in its young age was disfigured by some massive hunks of botched planets. Nearly 4 billion years ago, earth faced the assault of multiple massive chunks of failed planets, which caused the disfigurement of the planet, said the researchers.

After months of experiments, researches, and simulations on earth’s migration in our planetary system, the researchers from the David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, has landed on the view that clusters of space rock, called ‘planetesimals’ and dust of the failed planets might have impacted the major components of the solar system including Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The attack is believed to happen throughout the Late Heavy Bombardment period when the earth and solar system was assaulted by a supermassive space rock or asteroid.

In the research is a collaborative study, conducted by the scientists of the Nesvorny and SwRI. Lead by SwRI’s scientist William Bottke, the study paper was presented at the 229th assembly of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), conducted earlier this month.

According to the simulations, made by the lead author of the study, “when massive planets took big moves, they departed a number of planetesimals trash behind and these planetesimals are hypothetically much more enormous than the asteroids we currently found between Mars and Jupiter. Such planetesimal trashes can also be the best explanation for the supermassive craters, spotted during the juvenile period of the earth as well as in the present-day Mars and the Moon.

As said by Bottke, “Currently we have almost no evidence to prove this theory. But we are working on the development of more accurate scaling numbers, which will help us to verify our findings in the near future.”