3 ms·
Can it be made of common elements, just very compressed? Like a piece of a disrupted giant planet core? IIRC, iron-nickel alloy in Earth core has about twice th
by Qem 3y ago
Can it be made of common elements, just very compressed? Like a piece of a disrupted giant planet core? IIRC, iron-nickel alloy in Earth core has about twice the normal density, due to pressure. Can those high densities be kept in case of planetary disruption, without it explosively decompressing?
- checkyoursudo 3y agoExplosive decompression comes from internal pressure overcoming its container, where the pressure within the container is greater than without. The core of a planet is pretty much the opposite, where the pressure is coming from the outside and smushing things together. I know it seems similar, but it isn't really. You know how diamonds do not "explosively decompress" (explode) after they are formed? Think of it more like that. Popping the core out of the centre of a planet intact would be your bigger challenge, I think. A collision with enough force to crack open a planet down to its core is probably not going to leave the core crystal intact.
- simne 3y agoNot even very compressed. Just enough to it, be monolith, as usual asteroids are just like stuck together small stones of irregular form, plus cosmic dust, also not dense. Question is, that at the moment not found any similar asteroids, so this is not common for them, to appear such way. So, when we see something so unusual, we have two options - they could be just from more heavy elements, or their history was unusual.