There is something new to look for in the skies and according to planetary scientists Simon Lock at Harvard University and Sarah Stewart at the University of California (USA) it is a huge, spinning mass shaped like a donut or donut. , formed by vaporized rock caused by colossal shocks.
Is it possible that the Earth was a synaesty in the remote past? So these experts believe.
Lock and Stewart study how planets form from a series of giant impacts . Current theories of planet formation hold that rocky planets such as Earth, Mars, and Venus formed early in our solar system’s existence while smaller objects collided with each other. These collisions were so violent that the resulting bodies melted and partially vaporized, cooling and solidifying on the planets we know today.
Both experts are particularly interested in collisions between rotating objects. A rotating object has an angular momentum, which must be conserved in a collision. So they modeled what happens when rocky planets the size of Earth collide with other large objects with high high energy and equal angular momentum. “We look at the giant impact statistics, and we’ve found that they can form a completely new structure,” explains Stewart.
The researchers found that over a range of high temperatures and high angular momentum, planetary-size bodies could form a new, much larger structure, a disk like a red blood cell or a donut with a filled center. It would be a vaporized rock, without any type of solid or liquid surface. This new object would be a ‘synestia’ (“syn-” means “together” and “Hestia” is the Greek goddess of architecture and structures).
According to experts, most planets suffer impacts that could form a synaestia at some point during their formation stage.
No one has observed a synaestia directly , but it could be found in other solar systems once astronomers start looking for it alongside rocky planets and gas giants. Soon – or maybe not – we’ll see.
The study has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
Image credit: Simon Lock and Sarah Stewart
