Rocks can be many things: they were probably our earliest weapons, they’ve been ballast on our journeys of exploration, even modern-art pieces. But a pair recovered from Antarctica may be the grandest application yet – tombstones for an entire world. Lunar and Planetary Institute researcher Allain Treiman believes that them to be pieces of a destroyed dwarf planet, relics from the creation of the solar system. It’s relevant to questions so important that most adults don’t think to ask them – why are there only eight planets? Or nine, or however many there are now? Why are they where they are? Because of all the objects that formed during the birth of the solar system, the ones we see are the ones that survived. It’s likely that many small proto-planets formed as the stellar dusts condensed into larger bodies – some collided and merged, some may have been pinballed out of the system by the varying gravitational fields, and it seems that some got smashed to bits in the confusion. The existence of the asteroid belt supports such planetary pile-ups – but we can look at these antarctic rocks much closer
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Antarctica Yields Fossils of a Destroyed Dwarf Planet
