The cometary mission uncovers a gap in the understanding of the formation of planets

The cometary mission uncovers a gap in the understanding of the formation of planets

German scientists say that the Rosetta ship managed to find the missing link in the process of planetary formation. New research has tried to understand the details of the comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko, created more than 4.5 billion years ago.

The main goal of Missy Rosetta was to understand the evolutionary path of our system. The data of the device and the Fila probe showed that only one model is capable of explaining observations. The comet consists of dust pebbles with a range from millimeters to centimeters. This means that dust pebbles are concentrated so strongly in the solar nebula that total gravity will eventually lead to collapse. This process is a gap between the creation of dust pebbles (the building blocks of the planets) and the gravitational accretion of planetesimals. In this mechanism, dust compounds do not collapse, as it may seem, but merge into a larger celestial body with a large gravitational pull. In fact, this is the stage of the emergence of comets.

Due to the small mass of 67P, the pebbles managed to survive to this day, which allowed to confirm the hypothesis. The model of the formation of pebbles and collapse is capable of explaining the many observable properties of comet 67P (high porosity and ejected amount of gas).

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