If we look at the rings of Saturn , we see that they have a flattened shape due to the centrifugal force exerted by the materials around it. The Sun , in the early days of the Solar System, also had rings around it. And this influences why the Earth is not bigger.
Earth is the largest rocky planet in the Solar System, but not quite a super-Earth. The so-called ” super-Earths ” are terrestrial planets that orbit around stars and are larger than our planet, forming around 30% of the rocky exoplanets discovered so far.
Pressure zones, keys in the creation of the Earth
However, our planet did not grow to such a large size due to small pressure zones in those early solar rings, new research published in Nature Astronomy has detailed. The team behind the research, including members from Rice University, the University of Bordeaux, the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, ran hundreds of supercomputer simulations to recreate the formation. Of the solar system.
In it, they found three high-pressure bands in the early solar accretion disk, which may explain the composition of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and the formation of the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. They can also explain the nearly circular orbits of the four inner planets, their composition, and their various sizes.
These high-pressure zones can concentrate dust and act like factories for planets as material accumulates. To simulate this, they used first dust, then planetesimals, and finally planets. According to their proposal, they claim that the pressure spikes produced deposits of material in the inner and outer zone of the solar system, and regulated the amount of material available for the planets to grow in the inner zone.
Earth might not have existed
If the disk had been uniform in its composition, the present solar system could have been very different from the present one, since the dust particles would have gone to the inner zone and would have been lost in the Sun. Therefore, there had to be something to become planets.
At those high-pressure points, the gas is denser and gas particles move faster, helping to slow down heavier material like dust and rocks, helping them accumulate into planets.
The fact that we don’t live on a Super Earth is a good thing, since a Super Earth 10 times larger would have 10 times larger gravity. If you weigh 70 kg on Earth, on that planet you would weigh 700 kg, which would have considerably changed the type of life that formed on Earth. With such high gravity, a magnetic field may not have formed to protect us from ultraviolet radiation, and the solar winds would have destroyed any type of atmosphere, as is the case on Mars, for example.
With these conditions, astronomers have more information when it comes to identifying possible planets that can harbor life, since excessively large planets present problems such as the one we discussed in order to maintain an atmosphere around them.