A new analysis reveals that the gigantic impact that led to the Moon's formation might have also switched on Earth's magnetic field.

Interiors of Venus and Earth
Based on their bulk density, Venus and Earth have cores that take up about half of their radius and roughly 15% of their volumes. Researchers don't know if Venus has a solid inner core, as Earth does.
Don Davis / The New Solar System (4th ed.)

Planetary scientists don't really know what to make of Venus. Although it's a near twin of Earth in size, mass, and overall rocky composition, the two are worlds apart (so to speak) in many ways. One obvious difference is our sister planet's dense, cloud-choked atmosphere. This enormous blanket of carbon dioxide has triggered a runaway greenhouse effect, trapping solar energy so well that the planet's surface temperature has rocketed to roughly 460°C (860°F).

Dig deeper, and the differences become even starker. Based on its density alone, Venus must have an iron-rich core that's at least partly molten — so why does it lack the kind of global magnetic field that Earth has? To generate a field, the liquid core needs to be in motion, and for a long time theorists suspected that the planet's glacially slow 243-day spin was inhibiting the necessary internal churning.

But that's not the cause, researchers say. "The generation of a global magnetic field requires core convection, which in turn requires extraction of heat from the core into the overlying mantle," explains Francis Nimmo (University of California, Los Angeles). Venus lacks any of the plate tectonism that's a hallmark of Earth — there's no rising and sinking of plates to carry heat from the deep interior in conveyor-belt fashion. So for the past two decades Nimmo and others have concluded that the mantle of Venus must be overly hot, and heat can't escape from the core fast enough to drive convection.

Now a new idea has emerged that attacks the problem from a wholly new angle. As Seth Jacobson (now at Northwestern University) and four colleagues detail in September's Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Earth and Venus might both have ended up without magnetic fields, save for one critical difference: The nearly assembled Earth endured a catastrophic collision with a Mars-size impactor — the one that led to the Moon's creation — and Venus did not.

Jacobson and his team simulated the gradual build-up of rocky planets like Venus and Earth from countless smaller planetesimals early in solar system history. As bigger and bigger chunks came together, whatever iron they delivered sank into the completely molten planets to form cores. At first the cores consisted almost completely of iron and nickel. But more core-forming metals arrived by way of impacts, and this dense matter sank through each planet's molten mantle — picking up lighter elements (oxygen, silicon, and sulfur) along the way.

Over time these hot, molten cores developed several stable layers (maybe as many as 10) of differing compositions. "In effect," the team explains, "they create an onion-like shell structure within the core, where convective mixing eventually homogenizes the fluids within each shell but prevents homogenization between shells." Heat would still bleed out into the mantle but only slowly, via conduction from one layer to the next. Such a stratified core would lack the wholesale circulation necessary for a dynamo, so there'd be no magnetic field. This might have been the fate of Venus.

Magnetic field of Earth
Thanks to churning convection in its liquid outer core, Earth has a substantial magnetic field. Blue arrow indicates pole direction; yellow arrow points toward the Sun.
NASA-GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio / JPL / NAIF

On Earth, meanwhile, the Moon-forming impact affected our planet literally to its core, creating turbulent mixing that disrupted any compositional layering and creating the same mix of elements throughout. With this kind of homogeneity, the core started convecting as a whole and drove heat readily into the mantle. From there, plate tectonism took over and delivered that heat to the surface. The churning core became the dynamo that created our planet's strong, global magnetic field.

What's not yet clear is how stable these compositional layers would really be. The next step, Jacobson says, is to grind through more rigorous numerical modeling of the fluid dynamics involved.

The researchers note that Venus certainly endured its share of big impacts as it grew in size and mass. But apparently none of them hit planet hard enough — or late enough — to disrupt the compositional layering that had already settled out in its core. By contrast, the team concludes, "Earth was struck violently at the end of its growth, simultaneously creating its Moon and homogenizing its core." If they're right, then the divergence of Earth and Venus becomes a classic story of planetary "haves" and "have nots."

Comments


Image of Robert-LaPorta

Robert-LaPorta

December 5, 2017 at 10:42 am

If this is proven to be true, it constrains even more tightly the probablility of life and intelligent life. It is highly unlikely manyEarth size planets are struck with Mars size bodies. This would mean very few Earth size planets have appreciable magnetic fields. Solar particles would not be deflected and heavy radiation would reach the surface, such as occurs on Mars. This could prevent the development of complex molecules and development of life.

Thus the Earth and life become even more special and rare.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of Jon-Groubert

Jon-Groubert

December 5, 2017 at 4:05 pm

That's a good point, Robert, but it ain't necessarily so. We humans could not evolve on such a planet that was bathed in radiation. But other organisms, like the now famous water bears, as well as cockroaches, and certain flour beetles, have an inherent resistance to radiation. It's always a case of "life-as-we-know-it".

An as Star Wars loves to display, whether rightly or wrongly, intelligent life may be able to develop from any of a wide variety of life. Chewbacca is a very intelligent dog; Admiral Ackbar is some sort of evolved trout; Jabba is a big, smart slug. We can't definitively state that intelligent life could not evolve from lesser species that happen to be radiation-resistant. We only have a sample size of one, and that's not enough to extrapolate from.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of

December 8, 2017 at 4:15 pm

100 percent correct.

Forget the Star Wars nonsense.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of Genac

Genac

December 8, 2017 at 4:28 pm

Methinks ye underestimate the vastness of space. There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Essentially our comprehension yields an infinite universe and given infinite iterations of mass-containing systems, the likelihood of countless earth clones is near certainty.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of Anthony Barreiro

Anthony Barreiro

December 8, 2017 at 5:56 pm

I find Robert's argument compelling. We know of one planet where life has evolved: our own Earth. It seems quite significant that Earth has an anomalously large Moon, orbiting, not around the planet's equator as do all the other known moons, but in Earth's ecliptic plane. The Moon serves as an orbital outrigger, keeping Earth's poles from wobbling too much and thus our seasons consistent, and giving us those lovely tides and biologically rich tide pools. And now we learn, perhaps the Moon's creation mixed up our core and thus has sustained our protective magnetic field for billions of years!

Many people who have read a lot of science fiction assume that the universe must teem with life, and try to put the burden of proof on skeptics to show that life doesn't exist out there. But it is more philosophically and scientifically reasonable simply to acknowledge that we don't yet know whether life has evolved anywhere else in the universe. We should keep looking, fully accepting that we might not ever find any sign of extraterrestrial life. And, regardless of our personal biases about the probability of extraterrestrial life, we all need to do a much better job of caring for this one biosphere where we shall all survive or go extinct.

By the way, Kelly, this is a fascinating article!

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of Lindsay

Lindsay

December 9, 2017 at 6:30 pm

As always Anthony, I find your comments insightful, education and compelling.
In addition to what have been listed in response to Kelly's article, there are probably many more reasons why planets do not generate magnetic cores. I have read that the core must have the right nickel content to generate a magnetic core: see doc: 10.1038/ncomms16062

With regards to intelligent life on the hundred billion or so planets in our Milky Way, why haven't the SETI folks been receiving extra-terrestrial radio signals from these aliens?

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of AB

AB

December 10, 2017 at 9:31 pm

This presumes that the aliens bothered to create radio signals or need them to communicate? Given a very different planet, intelligent inhabitants might communicate by telepathy, or pheromones, or a planet-wide conscious link, or any number of things we can't even imagine. They might wonder about other intelligent life out there and be trying to connect with it by holding large group efforts to contact alien consciousnesses through their concept of a spirit world. Who knows???

... Chewbacca's a DOG....???? XD

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of Tony1951

Tony1951

December 19, 2021 at 5:34 pm

If our definition of 'intelligent life' requires the use of radio signals that we can currently detect and understand, we would miss a huge range of intelligent species. Radio was invented on the earth only a little over a hundred years ago and it was not until comparatively recently that signals generated here might conceivably have been detected far from our planet. If an alien species had been turning its antennae towards the earth in the late eighteenth century when the American Constitution was being written and the Enlightenment was in full swing, they would, using these criteria have concluded that Earth and the Solar System hosted no intelligent species. Furthermore, radio used for mass communications is rapidly going out of use. The growth in far higher bandwidth communications systems such as cable and fibre will soon supercede much of Earth's current, high power radio chatter. Aliens of an intelligent character, might well have evolved long before Johnny Come Lately H. Sapiens - who really only arrived about sixty thousand years ago. They might be so far advanced over ourselves that a) they have no more interest in us than most of us have in the average cockroach, and b) may well have evolved far more sophisticated forms of communication than narrow band wireless transmissions to beam at other planets. Then there is the question of which solar systems to beam the messages at. Current estimates are that our own galaxy has four hundred billion stars in it. Why would they beam their efforts in our direction?

Finally - there is some merit in the idea that once a species becomes capable of manipulating its environment through high technology, it is very soon going to wipe itself out, through overpopulation, disease, and planetary degradation. We seem to be well on that path ourselves, doubling our numbers in the last forty years, changing our climate and potentially, generating weapons that would leave any survivors of a future war living once again in the Stone Age. It is quite hard to make a high power radio and antenna system once society is back in Dark Age chaos, or even worse - living in caves and huts.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of John Sheff

John Sheff

December 5, 2017 at 11:10 pm

It's a complicated situation. What we have to remember is that Venus is the only planet whose rotation is retrograde. Its axial inclination is 177° to its orbital plane; it's rotating almost exactly upside down. It's hard to come up with an explanation for this that doesn't involve a huge impact by a large body early in the history of the solar system. So Venus, like Earth, must have gotten whacked. But of course, the devil is in the details...

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of J. Kelly Beatty

J. Kelly Beatty

December 6, 2017 at 5:48 pm

hi, John -- great observation. so I asked the research's main author, Seth Jacobson about this. his response: "To my knowledge, giant impacts are associated with rapid spin. They more-or-less reset the spin state of the planet, and it's just unlikely that the spin state will be reset to zero. Small impacts are the opposite. They tend to drive the spin state in a specific way. I don't see an inconsistency between an early last giant impact on Venus and a slow spinning Venus at the end of planet formation." note the "early" in his last sentence — the layered core Jacobson envisions doesn't remain stable if Venus takes a big *late* hit — which is what happened on Earth.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of mike

mike

December 7, 2017 at 9:21 am

There has been a great deal of work going all the way back to the late 1960s that can explain Venus' retrograde rotation. I refer you to the work of Dobrovolskis & Ingersoll (1980) and more recently Correia & Laskar (2001) who show that Core-Mantle Friction along with Tidal Torques on Venus' thick atmosphere are sufficient to explain its present day rotation period. In fact Dobrovolskis & Ingersoll mention the possibilty that w/o a thick atmosphere Venus could have even been tidally locked to the sun (as the Moon is to the Earth). A more recent paper by Rory Barnes has even shown that this could have also come true for Earth if it's initial spin state was about 1/3 of what it is today.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of Dave-Hook

Dave-Hook

December 11, 2017 at 4:59 am

Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision and Venus' recent birth begins to sound more plausible by the day.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of MickeyJ65

MickeyJ65

December 6, 2017 at 4:57 pm

Also, I don't think it's necessarily unlikely for Earth size objects to be hit by Mars size objects, especially during the early formation of the solar system ( s ).

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of james-ball

james-ball

December 8, 2017 at 5:51 pm

How much would convection currents be reduced by the simple fact that the surface temperature is 800+F on Venus versus 70F on Earth? Simple physics will say that the larger the temperature gradient the greater the convection current will be. If Venus can not vent its internal heat out to space easily, then the convection will be reduced. Also just having the Moon in orbit around the Earth will increase the "mixing" of the liquid core through gravitational tidal forces, which Venus also doesn't have.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of

December 9, 2017 at 11:25 am

Some very interesting and well-considered ideas. What I always wonder about, is that since Venus is exposed to twice as much solar radiation and solar wind than Earth, why does it have an atmosphere at all? In the billions of years that have passed, why hasn't it been stripped away, lacking the protections of the magnetic field Earth has?

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of loafman

loafman

October 1, 2018 at 5:16 am

i know you made this comment ages ago, but i think i have an answer. i have read that venus has so much atmosphere, when the solar wind hits the atmosphere it charges the atmosphere creating a weak magnetic field.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of NASA Fan

NASA Fan

January 17, 2018 at 11:28 pm

Why is Venus very slow at rotating?

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Image of Arrive@love.com

[email protected]

October 1, 2018 at 2:45 pm

What if we could perturb a Kuiper Belt object or a series of objects to impact Venus? Would something the size of Pluto or Xena be enough to accomplish any of these:
1. Mix the homogeneous core layers of Venus?
2. Eject enough mass into orbit to create Venusian moon(s)?
3. Exert enough force to increase Venus' rotational rate?
4. Deliver an appreciable amount of water to Venus?

As to the philosophical questions I believe Life on Earth must outlast the life of Earth and as it's only space-faring species it is the duty and honor of Humans to spread this miracle as far and wide as possible to give all life the most opportunity to evolve into whatever it may need or want to.

I love you all - thank you.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

You must be logged in to post a comment.