It took about 95,000 photographs of the dwarf planet and
protoplanet and collected over 167 GB of scientific data.
A team of scientists under Stephanie Sallum in Tucson, Arizona used adaptive optics observations to record these protons and thereby detect the formation of the
protoplanet, which orbits a relatively young star just two million years old.
It involves devastating collisions with other small
protoplanets, as well as with a multitude of showering, tumbling worldlets.
If we assume that a
protoplanet took about a million years to lose most of its volatile elements, then c is found to be ~[10.sup.-3].
Lastly, water, once it is formed, must be gathered together on a
protoplanet before life can evolve--essential sequencing.
By that time, most of the iron and other heavy elements had already settled into the cores of each
protoplanet, which merged inside Earth after the impact.
Dawn previously explored the
protoplanet Vesta for 14 months, from 2011 to 2012, capturing detailed images and data about that body.
These impish nicknames arise from the fundamental basis of the theory: a Mars-sized
protoplanet, named Theia by astronomers, crashed into the primordial Earth billions of years ago.
Each particle represents a unit of something--whether a
protoplanet, a star, or even a galaxy.