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How was the Earth made? |
Our Planet
The Earth has been around for a much longer time than people have, and as long as people have been around, we’ve been trying to figure out how Earth was made. There have been lots of different ideas about how it happened. Today most scientific research tells us that the Earth was formed with the rest of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. Before the sun and planets, our solar system was a lot of space dust! Over millions of years, gravity pulled the dust into a lot of round shapes. One of those was a very early version of our Earth.
A lot of scientists think that after becoming round and solid, the Earth was hit by another object in our solar system that was about the size of Mars! This object is often called Theia, and when it hit the Earth, it knocked out a gigantic chunk of material into space. This material left a huge gap that may have made room for the oceans. The piece that was knocked into space is most likely now our moon!
A Tasty Model
Have you ever seen someone make cotton candy? It’s that fluffy, tasty and colorful treat you’ll see at parades and carnivals. If you want a visualization of how Earth came together from pieces of space dust, cotton candy isn’t a bad model.
A cotton candy machine is a big metal drum where sugar is heated so it becomes sticky (Think of the stickiness acting like gravity). The drum spins, throwing the sugar. The cotton candy maker holds a paper stick in the middle of this and the sugar sticks to it. Sugar catches more sugar and soon the cotton candy starts forming. The bigger it gets, the more sugar it is able to pull in. It can keep growing as long as there’s more sugar to add. Eventually you have a tasty treat (or, you know, a planet). Enjoy!