He’s not out to create a big new world. His lab, a windowless cubicle at Union College in Schenectady, New York, couldn’t accommodate anything much larger than a sandbox. It’s actually just the principle he’s after: the fundamental process by which real estate evolves from cosmic debris.Researchers have long assumed that the solar system’s inner planets--the rocky ones--grew from collisions of giant, moonlike planetesimals. The planetesimals, of course, grew from similar collisions--bigger rocks from smaller rocks all the way back to primordial grit. The problem is that no one ever bothered to check this idea in the lab.
You have to understand that planetary people are more concerned with the question of what happens when two planetesimals collide, Peak says. People spend a lot of time doing computer simulations of collisions between really large objects. The study of the very beginnings of the solar system hasn’t received a lot of attention yet.
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