Escaping helium suggests our world may have formed quickly in a young solar system.
. Typically, scientists think the proto-Earth and other planets in the early solar system formed gradually as dust accumulated, clumping into larger and larger chunks, he says. But ancient helium trapped deep in Earth could indicate a different story.
The early solar system had a sun-centered cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula, which most researchers think dispersed after one million or two million years, Sharp says. For decades, astronomers’ go-to explanation has been that grains of dust in the nebula conglomerated into larger particles. These got bigger and bigger until they formed objects miles across, which then crashed into each other “like bumper cars,” Sharp says, ultimately bulking up to planet size.
In this speedier scenario, Earth’s gravity would have pulled in a dense, thick, and high-temperature atmosphere from the solar nebula. Earth would have been hot, harboring a “magma ocean” over its surface, Sharp says. They think that helium travels all the way up from the core, to the mantle, and “oozes out of the Earth” from mid-ocean ridges where the tectonic plates pull apart. This helium also emerges from “hot spots” in places like Hawaii, Yellowstone, and Iceland, where plumes of magma rise from deep underground, Sharp says. The helium is so light that it rises high in the atmosphere and gets lost to space.
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