Earth may have had muddy origin: Study

Planets like Earth may have started as gigantic balls of warm mud and not as rocky asteroids as previously thought, a new study suggests. Scientists have long held the belief that planets – including Earth – were built from rocky asteroids, but new research challenges that view.

Researchers at Curtin University in Australia suggest that many of the original planetary building blocks in our solar system may actually have started life, not as rocky asteroids, but as gigantic balls of warm mud. Phil Bland, Curtin University planetary scientist, undertook the research to try and get a better insight into how smaller planets, the precursors to the larger terrestrial planets we know today, may have come about.

“The assumption has been that hydrothermal alteration was occurring in certain classes of rocky asteroids with material properties similar to meteorites,” said Bryan Travis, senior scientist at Curtin University. “However, these bodies would have accreted as a high- porosity aggregate of igneous clasts and fine-grained primordial dust, with ice filling much of the pore space.

“Mud would have formed when the ice melted from heat released from decay of radioactive isotopes, and the resulting water mixed with fine-grained dust,” said Travis. Travis used his Mars and …read more