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Planetary science

Evolutionary dichotomy for rocky planets

Nature volume 497, pages 570–572 (2013)Cite this article

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A simple model shows that a rocky planet close to its star may solidify so slowly that its water is lost to space and the planet becomes desiccated, whereas a planet farther out may solidify quickly and retain its water. See Letter p.607

Earth and Venus were probably built from similar rocky materials, having been formed by similar mass-accretion processes. The giant impacts that characterize these processes are thought to melt the growing planets to some depth, producing one or more magma-ocean stages during which the silicate portion of the planet is melted before solidifying. Thus, there has been no reason to suspect that Venus and Earth differed through the first tens and probably hundreds of millions of years of the Solar System, and Venus is commonly thought to have lost its water through some later divergence from Earth-like evolution. On page 607 of this issue, Hamano et al.1 present a simple model that might explain why rocky planets that have similar compositions but orbit at different distances from their host stars can end their magma-ocean stages with either an Earth-like wetness or a Venus-like dryness. This model does not require any later divergence to explain the differences between the planets.

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Figure 1: Hamano and colleagues' evolutionary model for terrestrial planets1.

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  1. Linda T. Elkins-Tanton is in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC 20015, USA.,

    Linda T. Elkins-Tanton

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  1. Linda T. Elkins-Tanton
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Correspondence to Linda T. Elkins-Tanton.

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Elkins-Tanton, L. Evolutionary dichotomy for rocky planets. Nature 497, 570–572 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/497570a

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