14 DAY TRIAL // According to statistical estimates, Earth's rocks should have a much higher concentration of carbon dioxide inside them than proven scientifically, and the discrepancy has experts asking where the rest of the chemical went. The estimates were drawn from the amount of carbon that can be found in the planet-forming regions of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which should in theory be translated into approximate concentrations in the rocks as well. Another mystery to geologists is why meteorites found on Earth also have low carbon concentrations, when comets seem to show no deviation from the general rule.
In the vastness of space, the interstellar medium is filled with dust containing carbon-rich and silicate-rich grains. These elements can be found on a large scale in this environment, but for some reason, only silicon made its way plentifully in our planet's crust. In fact, geologists believe, it's silicon that is the bulk material making up Earth, for example, and most likely other planets and moons in the solar system and beyond as well. But, until now, there was no reasonable explanation astronomers could think of that would have explained why carbon falls short of its expected proportion in rocks and meteorites.
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (UMAA) expert Ted Bergin believes that responsible for the depletion of carbon in the proto-planetary disks that eventually formed our planet is the chemical oxygen. In such a disk, cosmic dust revolves around a young star, and is forced to eventually pull itself together and accrete around a central point. By all accounts and purposes, it should be that the new bodies have equal amounts of silicon and carbon; in fact, this is the stage where oxygen steps in.
“The reaction is oxygen hitting the carbon grain and sputtering carbon off,” he explains. At the right temperature, the chemicals are bound in other elements, and silicon prevails in the composition of the disk. The further away the reaction is moved from the heat source, in this instance the Sun, the slower the reaction is, which may help explain why Mars, our closest neighbor, does not seem to exhibit the same geological abnormality as Earth does, Nature News informs.