Mars is still an "embryo" of planet

The planet Mars twisted in record time and reached its current size in just three million years, much faster than scientists thought. That rate of formation of the Red Planet could explain that its mass is one tenth of that of the Earth. The study supports a theory more than two decades, according to which the planet remained small because it avoided collisions with what would become the "planetary construction materials", ie other objects in space. The finding is published in the journal Nature.

In the early days of the solar system before the planets were formed, a cloud of gas and dust surrounding the Sun Scientists believe that the planets arose from the accumulation of this material driven by electrostatic energy.

These protoplanets formed by dust balls grew and grew into what scientists call planets embryos: masses of stone large enough to have a considerable force exerting gravitational pull on various materials, including other nascent planets.

The interaction of the forces used to lift emerging embryonic planets orbit, sometimes to stand in the way of a larger one. If collided, the nascent planets could also be ejected from the solar system or even result in pieces. Many were integrated to form larger planets. In fact, it is believed that the Earth's moon is the result of the collision of an embryo planet Earth.

Creating models, astrophysicists can determine what should be the mass of the planets according to their distance from the Sun And that's where something goes wrong with Mars, which should have grown to a size similar to that of our planet, but it is or one tenth. For the small size of Mars, many scientists suspect that the Red Planet avoided impacts that would have made it grow.

Small and red

Esudiando chemical composition of meteorites, Nicholas Dauphas geochemists, University of Chicago, and Ali Pormand, University of Miami, joined forces to try to confirm the thesis. With the use of radioactive elements, Pourmand and Dauphas obtained more precise estimates of the time it took to Mars in its formation.

Between two and three million years, according suspect, short compared to Earth, thought it took tens of millions of years to reach its current size. "We are pleasantly surprised that we now have precise evidence to support this idea: that Mars is an embryo in transition to world class," he told the BBC Pourmand.

"We are pleasantly surprised that we now have precise evidence to support this idea: that Mars is an embryo in transition to the category of planet" Ali Pourmand, University of Miami The scientist believes that Mars should have the size that presents today when Earth began his training. Chances are that remained small because it avoided colliding with other objects.

"The fact that Mars has remained relatively unscathed may be just a matter of luck," said astrophysicist Duncan Forgan of the University of Edinburgh. Forgan explains how unlikely it is that  a planet gets collision avoidance for so long, but agree that it is statistically expected to occur from time to time.

According to the expert, to build the model of planetary dynamics, researchers found easier to predict what will happen in general, but it is much more difficult to determine what happens in specific solar systems or individual cases like that of Mars.