Sentences with phrase «own iron core»

Two days later, the torrid gas cloud crashed against Earth's magnetosphere — the magnetic field generated by the planet's spinning molten iron core that helps deflect the solar wind and more potent solar jetsam.

Below the ice, scientists predict there's a layer of magnesium silicate perovskite (minerals also found in Earth's mantle) and then a liquid iron core.

The first hint that Earth actually had a solid iron core beneath a liquid layer came in 1929, after a magnitude - 7.8 earthquake shook New Zealand.

Earth's magnetic field is generated in its liquid iron core, and this «geodynamo» requires a regular release of heat from the planet to operate.

THE Earth's solid iron core may recycle itself every 100 million years, melting on one side and resolidifying on the other.

It has an iron core and a thick, heat - trapping atmosphere.

IRON CORE Mercury's iron - rich core extends three - quarters of the way to the surface and makes up 60 percent of the planet's mass.

However, Vlada Stamankovic of the German Aerospace Center in Berlin reckons it is too soon to rule out molten iron cores — and magnetic fields — for super-Earths.

Planets are thought to owe their magnetic fields to an iron core that is at least partly molten.

These structures could indicate that mantle plumes once rose from Venus» iron core to the outer layer, thus softening and weakening the planet's surface.

City - size planetesimals — rocky microworlds that clumped together in the solar nebula — smashed into our planet's surface at incredible velocities and seeped down to Earth's iron core, depositing yet more iron.

Planetary scientists think magnetic fields are produced by the churning of a planet's molten iron core.

But if lighter material, like hydrogen, settles close to the iron core, it could block dense material from sinking deep enough to keep convection going, said O'Rourke, of Arizona State University in Tempe.

An exoplanet discovered 340 million light years away may shed some light on how Mercury got to be such a weird world — a tiny planet made mostly of an iron core

The biggest challenge of studying the planet's middle, biggest layer — sandwiched between its iron core and thin surface that hosts its living creatures — is that it can't been seen.

The new, high - resolution map of the mantle — the hot rock below Earth's crust but above the planet's iron core — not only shows these connections for many hotspots on the planet, but reveals that below about 1,000 kilometers the plumes are between 600 and 1,000 kilometers across, up to five times wider than geophysicists thought.

This process would let metal trickle down through the mantle, accumulate in the center, and form a metal core, like the iron core at the heart of our home planet.

A huge, molten iron core would explain Mercury's apparent density and its magnetic field.

One of Messenger's key tasks is to search for evidence regarding its iron core.

If the impactor contained an iron core, it probably glommed onto Earth's during the Mixmaster physics that followed the collision.

But what would explain the iron core?

The long - held assumption was that it takes a planet the size of Earth to insulate a molten iron core, whose currents and eddies act as a dynamo to generate a magnetic field.

Previous astronomical observations suggested that Mercury contains more metal in proportion to its volume than Earth does but did not indicate whether all this metal was distributed evenly or concentrated in a huge iron core.

«We get a radius of 110 kilometers [68 miles] for an iron core,» exactly what would be expected if all of Vesta's iron pooled at its center.

Vesta, they concluded, must have a layered internal structure like Earth does, with a crust and probably even an iron core.

All of the heaviest elements in the cosmos (like Earth's iron core) and half of the middleweight ones (like the oxygen and carbon essential to biology) were forged in the cauldrons of exploding stars.

Vesta, like Earth, has a complex internal structure, with a massive iron core and a mantle.

Earth and Mercury are both rocky planets with iron cores, but Mercury's interior differs from Earth's in a way that explains why the planet has such a bizarre magnetic field, UCLA planetary physicists and colleagues report.

It melted early on to form an iron core and rocky mantle and crust, spewed volcanic outpourings, and then suffered a massive impact.

«We had figured out how the Earth works, and Mercury is another terrestrial, rocky planet with an iron core, so we thought it would work the same way.

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

Sorting through 40 - year - old records of moonquakes (red dots) has apparently revealed a liquid - iron core (yellow) and a solid - iron inner core (orange).

GJ 1132b, as it is known, looks a bit like home: only 16 % bigger in diameter than Earth and about the same density, suggesting a similar rocky crust and iron core.

Now NASA's Messenger spacecraft has revealed that the planet's liquid iron core has been generating a magnetic field for the past 3.8 billion years.

After nearly four years in orbit and discovering water ice, organic compounds and the planet's iron core, NASA's Messenger orbiter will make one last thruster boost on 21 January.

Its dense iron core takes up 42 per cent of its volume, its orbit is less circular than that of the other planets, and current planetary formation models predict Mercury should be closer to the sun and bigger, so we know we're missing something.

This article appeared in print under the headline «Space bullets could have formed Earth's iron core»

That rules out some previously proposed ways of forming Mercury with its relatively huge molten iron core, such as having the nascent sun blasting away the outer rind of an Earthlike planet.

Eventually, this iron core grows so massive that it is crushed by its own gravity, forming a black hole.

(The moon, unlike Earth, does not have a dynamo within — a churning molten iron core that produces a magnetic field.)

«In particular, it means that Earth's mantle — the hot rock below Earth's crust but above the planet's iron core — is compositionally heterogeneous.

Unlike the other rocky planets in our solar system, it has an immense iron core that makes up roughly 70 per cent of the planet's volume.

It has long been thought that heat flow drives what is called thermal convection — the hottest liquid becomes less dense and rises, as the cooler, more - dense liquid sinks — in Earth's liquid iron core and generates Earth's magnetic field.

Kepler - 78b is most similar to Earth in mass, diameter and composition; it could be made of rock with an iron core.

Early estimates assumed it had an iron core, but this finding suggests that is incorrect (Science, DOI: 10.1126 / science.aal2879).

Despite being the smallest planet in the solar system (since Pluto was demoted from the ranks of the planets), Mercury has an abnormally large iron core.

Earth's density of 5.515 grams per cubic centimeter falls between these two figures, suggesting Kepler - 78b is, like Earth, made of rock with an iron core.

Peridotite, which glows like a green cat's eye, is one of the most common minerals in the mantle, the slushy zone between Earth's stiff crust and dense iron core.

Vesta has an iron core, formed during the period in which the protoplanet was molten, at the earliest epoch of the Solar System; Dawn's measurements of Vesta's gravitational field have confirmed this.

Carbon planets would probably consist mostly of carbides, thought they may have iron cores and substanial atmospheres.