Sentences with phrase «of rocky mantle»

Colliding at speeds up to 22,000 miles per hour (36,000 kilometers per hour), such a collision may have stripped most of the rocky mantle from the protoplanet that became Mercury with its iron - rich core, while a Mars - size protoplanet struck the early Earth off - center and created a spray of mostly mantle material that later accreted to form the Moon.

Not exact matches

Brent spent several years as a post-doctoral scholar at MIT and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. researching the Earth's rocky mantle.

Although its surface is an airless landscape of cracked ice, all the evidence says that beneath that bleak shell is a liquid water ocean stretching hundreds of kilometres down to the rocky mantle below.

The arrays are due to open for real in November to power a two - year mission to probe the guts of Mars and reveal how rocky planets» core, mantle and crust form

Earth's outermost shell is a fragmented jigsaw puzzle of rocky plates sliding over the mantle below.

For instance, a catastrophic impact could have stripped away most of Mercury's rocky mantle, leaving the planet with its relatively huge iron core.

The presence of this rock at a site indicates either that material has pushed up through Earth's crust from the mantle (a silicate rocky shell between the crust and the core with an average thickness of 2,886 km and depths ranging from 30 km to almost 3,000 km below the crust) or that a celestial body (a comet, meteor or meteorite) fell there.

Where researchers expected to find a large mantle plume, the map of the geologic structure beneath Yellowstone instead seems to show a ghostly fragment of an old tectonic plate — a former chunk of Earth's rocky shell — lodged under the western United States, right near the Yellowstone hot spot.

Published in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the paper uses laboratory simulations of an Earth impact as evidence that a stratified layer beneath the rocky mantle — which appears in seismic data — was created when Earth was struck by a smaller object.

Scientists have long wondered if the moon's vast subsurface ocean, sandwiched between a rocky mantle and a global sheet of ice, could prove as habitable as Earth's early oceans.

At the moment, the team's favored idea is akin to the second solution above: that large bodies of solid metal slowly dropped from the rocky mantle and into the core to lower the nucleation barrier.

Previous research showed Eureka is rich the mineral olivine, which forms in the mantles of large rocky bodies but is rare in asteroids.

That heat led to the separation of the primordial body into a rocky crust, an underlying rocky mantle, and a central metallic core, hallmarks of planet Earth and the other rocky planets.

If Pluto's core was rocky and its mantle icy, most of the material blasted into space by the collision would have been ice, accounting for Pluto's high rock - to - ice ratio today.

The interior of Vesta, unlike that of most asteroids, separated into layers resembling a planet's, with a rocky crust covering a mantle composed of the mineral olivine.

Analysis of data also shows that Ceres has a water - ice mantle surrounding a rocky core, and that there may still be at least pockets of liquid water beneath the surface, raising the prospect of potential habitability for microorganisms, as seemingly unlikely as that may sound for a world so far from the Sun.

As significant uncertainties about the thickness of the surface ice still exist, some planetary scientists have identified two possible mechanisms for how possible volcanic heat can escape to the surface from Europa's rocky mantle and be carried upward by buoyant oceanic currents.

«When our hero travels into Arabia Terra it is described as much rockier than Acidalia, but the opposite is generally true: much of Arabia is dust mantled and smooth at the scale of a rover,» NASA helpfully explained in the run - up to the release of the book's movie adaptation.

The interior of Venus is probably very similar to that of Earth, with an iron core about 6,000 km (3,700 miles) in diameter radius and a molten rocky mantle comprising most of the planet.

As a result, Vesta «differentiated» into a relatively dense metallic core (of approximately 136 miles or 220 kilometers across), lighter mantle, and crust, like the rocky inner planets, many large planetary satellite's like the Earth's Moon, and probably most, if not all, of the newly named «dwarf planets» like Ceres.

Assuming an iron - rich planet with an internal structure like Earth, modelling results for the first discovered super-Earth (GJ 876 d) indicate the existence of a threshold in planetary diameter above which a super-Earth «most certainly» has a high water content (an «ocean planet» or «water world,» where thick layers of water and pressurized ice surround a rocky mantle and core); this threshold was found to be around 24,000 kilometers (or nearly 15,000 miles) in the particular case of GJ 876 d (Valencia et al, 2007).

It really all depends of course on the rocky types of mantle and their makeup at depth and the amount of glacial melt being returned to the oceans, the amount of rainfall vs snowfall, the amount of water no longer being tied up in the icy environment as well as that melted from prior eras.

The author tells us that on timescales of 35 million years and more the Earth actually «breathes,» exhaling carbon dioxide from volcanoes and hot springs (many of the latter undersea), and inhaling it from the atmosphere into the oceans and forests — and eventually into the rocky crust, or even the fiery mantle beneath.