EARTHS MELTING DUE TO THE BLANKETING EFFECT OF THE PRIMORDIAL DENSE ATMOSPHERE

When the proto-Earth was growing by the accretion of planetesimals and its mass became greater than about 0.1 ME, where ME is the present Earth's mass, an appreciable amount of gas of the surrounding solar nebula was attracted towards the proto-Earth to form an optically thick, dense atmosphere. We have studied the structure of this primordial atmosphere under the assumptions that (1) it is spherically symmetric and in hydrostatic equilibrium, and (2) the net energy outflow (i.e., the luminosity) is constant throughout the atmosphere and is given by GMM/R with M = M/106 yr or M/107 yr where M and R are the mass and the radius of the proto-Earth, respectively. The results of calculations show that the temperature at the bottom of the atmosphere, namely, at the surface of the proto-Earth increases greatly with the mass of the proto-Earth and it is about 1500°K for M = 0.25 ME. This high temperature is due to the blanketing effect of the opaque atmosphere. Thus, as long as the primordial solar nebula was existing, the surface temperature of the proto-Earth was kept high enough to melt most of the materials and, hence, the melted iron sedimented towards the center to form the Earth's core. © 1979.