styopa
For those with more education than myself on the subject, please:
All the "envisionings" of early-forming protoearth that I've seen typically illustrate it as a molten hellhole, I'm curious why?
I could see a great deal of energy being generated by the collision/compression of the dust/debris cloud, but wouldn't most of this be in the gravitational center of mass? The outer surface would both suffer less compression heating AND be able to quickly radiate heat away, no?
Further, this process would have taken at least hundreds of millions of years, and so not necessarily resulted in really high (ie molten lava) temps at any given point...? Maybe 00's of degrees K, but doubtful 000's.
I'd asked this elsewhere, and the answer seems to be mostly hand-waving "there's a huge amount of mechanical heat generated by the dumping of kinetic energy" but it seems that even with this extraordinary amount of energy input, we're talking about LONG spans of times, and particles that would have started at nearly 0 deg K ... it just doesn't seem like this should result in thermal excesses so high that the early Earth would be the hypothesized 'ball of lava'.
Thanks!
All the "envisionings" of early-forming protoearth that I've seen typically illustrate it as a molten hellhole, I'm curious why?
I could see a great deal of energy being generated by the collision/compression of the dust/debris cloud, but wouldn't most of this be in the gravitational center of mass? The outer surface would both suffer less compression heating AND be able to quickly radiate heat away, no?
Further, this process would have taken at least hundreds of millions of years, and so not necessarily resulted in really high (ie molten lava) temps at any given point...? Maybe 00's of degrees K, but doubtful 000's.
I'd asked this elsewhere, and the answer seems to be mostly hand-waving "there's a huge amount of mechanical heat generated by the dumping of kinetic energy" but it seems that even with this extraordinary amount of energy input, we're talking about LONG spans of times, and particles that would have started at nearly 0 deg K ... it just doesn't seem like this should result in thermal excesses so high that the early Earth would be the hypothesized 'ball of lava'.
Thanks!