This massive shift occurred 800 million years ago, explained Adam Maloof, an associate professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in an NPR interview. Its rate of about 20 inches (50 centimeters) per day is breakneck speed in geology. That’s some five times faster than the rate that Earth’s crust moves today.
He said that the globe, as it rotates, shifts its weight toward the equator to maintain equilibrium, while the crust is sliding laterally: “The core of the Earth, the outer part, is actually fluid iron, and it has about the viscosity of water.”
This accounts for one of myriad moments when the universe went boom. Others far larger have occurred beyond our terrestrial realm.
In 2006, space probe Stardust brought back to Earth fascinating matter gathered from the comet Wild 2. Scientists expected to find substances formed far away from the sun—“cold” material—but found instead that it had matter forged both near and far away from the sun.
The astonishing implications were that matter formed abundantly in the inner solar system but was shot to the edge of the solar system.
Exploded Planet Hypothesis
Astronomer Tom Van Flandern counts those findings from Wild 2 as evidence supporting what’s called the Exploded Planet Hypothesis. He has said that over the course of the solar system’s 4.6 billion-year history, some of its planets were destroyed in blasts of great magnitude.This is a controversial hypothesis. Van Flandern had received pressure from his colleagues to drop it. He came to support this theory after beginning research that was intended to discredit it. Receiving his Ph.D. in astronomy from Yale, he has worked for 20 years at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where he became chief of the celestial mechanics branch, before beginning independent research on his more controversial topics.
Late Heavy Bombardment
Not long after the major planets formed, an unexpectedly large number of asteroids, it is believed, collided with the terrestrial planets, including Earth.Van Flandern states: “The late heavy bombardment, a real solar system event, sounds like an early planetary explosion event.”
Planets Moving
According to NASA: “One model for our own solar system suggests that our giant planets’ orbits shifted dramatically early in the solar system’s history, with Jupiter’s orbit migrating slightly inward toward the sun, and those of Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus expanding farther from the sun. These dramatic movements gave us the order of the planets and smaller bodies that we are familiar with today, and caused many smaller bodies (such as comets) to scatter.”Pulling forces from cosmic bodies beyond our solar system continue to cause changes in the alignment of planets, as slow and minute as those alterations may appear to us.
The bumpy history of our planet, moon, and solar system is still being explored and reveled by scientists. Did the planets form initially in their present locations, or have they moved around dramatically over the course of history? Have some even exploded? The mysteries behind these incredible cosmic forces, and their history, propels the imagination on into the future. Might there be more and far greater big booms yet to come? Shifting landmasses? Perhaps planets transiting the solar system? Only time will tell.