William also sent in the link https://msn.com/en-us/news/technology/researchers-discover-piece-of-an-ancient-planet-buried-deep-within-the-earth/ar-AA1xArkK … this press release seems to be doing the round of media sources at the moment without being picked up by science blogs. It will do – within the next couple of days. We are told that seismic imaging seems to have found two odd regions within Earth’s Mantle. This appears to be the same oddities in the Mantle mentioned in a post last week. They exist over Africa, and over the Pacific. In this press release they are described as continent sized. Depends what you call a continent. The oddities were found some time ago but this refers to the latest offering on the subject. They now have an official name – the Large Low Velocity Provinces. The headine says they are part of an ancient planet that crashed into Earth and created the Moon. This idea was rubbished in a research paper a week or so ago. Or at least, the idea was said to be ambiguous. Hence, we are basically in the province of theory – rather than fact. The media like this kind of thing as it catches headlines. In the new research paper we are told that remnants of Theia, a planet that collided with Earth, transformed earth’s interior, the Mantle. It revolves around modelling and the idea such a collision really did take place.
Over at https://www.livescience.com/space/astronomy/an-interstellar-visitor-may-have-changed-the-course-of-4-solar-system-planets-study-suggests … with the emphasis once again, on may have – as in may not have. It would seem interstellar visitors are becoming quite popular amongst astronomers. This involves no small object though as it is said to have been 8 times the mass of Jupiter. This is probably because it may have shifted the orbits of big planets like Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter itself. This is old hat physics as it is thought a large lump was required to shift the earth from its axis prior to the arrival of electro-magnetism in astronomy. Modelling was of course used and presumably they used simulation to arrive at the size of the interloper. These are a new generation to those astronomers back in the day who rubbished Velikovsky as whacky. We do of course need to read the actual article in order to find out the necessary detail. The research is on the arXiv server so has not been published by a journal as yet and some parts may be altered when it is published. Go to https://arxiv.org/html/2412.04583v1 …