Earth’s ability to sustain life depends a lot on volatile elements like carbon, hydrogen, sulfur and nitrogen that make up a large proportion of our atmosphere, allowing us to breathe and keep warm in cold space. In a new study from Rice University, CLEVER Planets PhD student Damanveer Grewal, Principal Investigator Rajdeep Dasgupta, Researcher Kyusei Tsuno and Postdoctoral scholar Chenguang Sun, with the help of Gelu Costin, suggest that most of these necessary elements may have been delivered to our planet when a Mars-sized planetary body smashed into early Earth more than 4.4 billion years ago. The late addition of...
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