Africa covers one of the masses, while the South Pacific Ocean covers the other. According to recent study, the catastrophe occurred over 4.46 billion years ago. However, it’s possible that some of Theia stayed inside Earth, sinking to a location slightly above the iron and nickel-rich heated core of our planet. Computer simulations were developed by researchers to examine their theory of the incident. They postulated that the moon was produced by the remnants of Theia, while the majority of Theia was absorbed into Earth, generating the two masses, based on these simulations.
These objects are denser than the material around them, and recent study shows that they may be remnants of a massive impact that occurred early in the history of our planet. The study’s primary author, Qian Yuan, is a geophysicist from Caltech and was just published in Nature. These blobs’ bottoms are 2,900 kilometers below the surface of the earth. The two blobs make up around 2% of the mass of Earth. Since seismic waves move more slowly in these two regions than they do in the surrounding mantle, seismology was able to detect them. The mass of each blob is double that of the moon as a whole. Thus, the blobs are enormous,” Yuan remarked.
These two masses would be proof of the potential moon-forming crash, if the idea is right. There is disagreement “about whether we can find evidence for this event not just in the moon but also in some observable property of the modern Earth,” according to Paul Asimow, a Caltech professor and co-author of the paper. Asimow went on, “the biggest difference in Earth structure from a simple layered planet” is the two masses. The study’s co-author, Hongping Deng of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, stated, “It is incredible because if we dig deep enough in Earth’s mantle, we can uncover relics of another planet called Theia.”
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