life on earth, life-giving carbon, mercury, mercury-like planet, planetary collision, silicon valley visas, sulfur

Element Ratios Suggest Earth Collided With a Mercury-Like Planet

Research by Rice University Earth scientists suggests that virtually all of Earth’s life-giving carbon could have come from a collision about 4.4 billion years ago between Earth and an embryonic planet similar to Mercury. In a new study this week in Nature Geoscience, Rice petrologist Rajdeep Dasgupta and colleagues offer a new answer to a long-debated geological question: ...

Troy Oakes

Planet Earth viewed from orbit.