Synestia Is a New Type of Planetary Object (IMAGE)

University of California - Davis

Synestia Is a New Type of Planetary Object

Caption

Rocky planets are thought to form from giant impacts between planet-size bodies. Impacts with high energy and high angular momentum could form a synestia, a rotating mass of vaporized rock, where outer layers of the vaporized planet are in orbit around the rest of the body. Synestias give new insights into how planets and moons form. This figure shows to scale a rocky planet, a molten disk/ring structure, and a synestia all with the same mass (about one Earth mass).

Credit

Simon Lock, Harvard University

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