Iron volcanoes exploded in space – billions of years ago

A planned tour of the asteroid psyche as a spaceship can provide direct evidence.

The birth of the solar system has resulted in a gradual growth of the planet's germs, but also their collisions. Some connected them in larger bodies, others were broken into pieces.

Among the ruins of devastating rains, we often found large balls of liquid metal. According to a new study, these have developed over time a solid bark that has been broken by iron volcanoes.

Research Paper published by Geophysical Research Letters.

The rest of the planet that did not appear

The Asteroid Psyche is the last complete memorial of the devastating events of the youngest of the solar system.

This 230 km piece of iron is the rest of the protoplanet – the ancient core of about 1,000 km of emerging worlds.

When NASA announced its intention to send a space probe to Psyche in 2022, Jacob Abrahams and Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, decided to examine the development of metal asteroids.

In fact, any new discovery could guide future research on Psyche in areas that were not originally considered.

Bright balls of one kilometer

In their analysis, the researchers discovered that planetary nuclei stiffened after more than 100 million years. This means that devastating collisions of the early development of the solar system, huge balls of liquid iron had to emerge.

Even the simple modeling of their cooling and solidification showed that these processes did not occur without volcanic eruptions.

"Before, it never occurred to me, but it makes sense because you have a less dense liquid under a much denser bark.In such an environment, liquids are pushed to penetrate the top," explains Francis Nimmo, co-author of the research.

Lava currents in thin paper?

The study suggests that incandescent metal balls – originally nuclei broken by protoplanets – would cool and solidify very rapidly in the cold of the cosmos.

"In some cases, they would stiffen in the middle, which would prevent volcanism, but in others, the solidification would start at the surface and move inward, so that a solid bark external with liquid metal would form underneath, "says Nimmo.

"If pure iron formed the melt, small viscous streams flowed to the surface in thin layers," continues Jacob Abrahams. "So, they did not look like the coarse streams of slime lava that you can see in Hawaii."

Otherwise, volcanic activity occurred as long as the melt contained mixtures of lighter elements and gases that expanded rapidly when the pressure dropped.

"The result would be explosive volcanism that would leave a deep depression on the surface," said Abrahams.

The best proof is … on Earth?

According to the authors of the study, the Psyche probe could encounter various evidence of ancient volcanism. For example, variations in color or surface composition, or volcanic structures such as volcanoes.

Large volcanic cones – a typical manifestation of volcanic activity on the surface – are not expected by the authors of the study. Billions of years have passed since the planned volcanic activity on Psyche and similar bodies, so they seem to have collapsed a long time ago.

However, evidence of volcanic activity on metallic asteroids could also bring the search to bodies that hit the Earth.

"We know a wide range of metallic meteorites and, thanks to our research, we know exactly what to look for," says Francis Nimmo.