Advanced Exploration Techniques and Services

Using both a combination of radioactive decay and density reduction, an attempt will be made to simplify how planets could have been smaller around formation.

Everyone understands the largest influence on planet size is gravity. Gravity controls the distribution of elements and molecules, meaning the heaviest particles are pulled into the core. The lighter elements resulting from this process are therefore pushed to the outer planet and accumulate over time. Other planets and galaxies will influence their gravity fields on ours too, controlling the orbit distance around the sun. Gravity also controls the orbit distance of our sun around the galaxy, but these influences on our planets temperature (gas / solid / liquid phases) are not well understood currently.

Excluding gravity influences from other stars, there are two prime causes for planet expansion being planet mass increase or planet density decrease. Firstly, planet mass increase is the simplest to describe as every planet (including the earth) attracts space dust, meteorites and small moons via their larger gravity fields, explaining some of the size increase but not all of the size increase. Geochemical fractionation is a result of the gravity field, with the chemical periodic table ordered using mass number. The elements in the atmosphere are the lightest in mass and elements in the crust being a mixture.

The densest elements (radionuclide’s) are in the core powering the planet through heat production from radiation, so the core is the prime candidate for the expansion source.

The more complex to explain is core density reduction through fission decay. If fission radioactive reactions (splitting of particles) outweighed fusion reactions (collision of particles) under the cores extreme gravity conditions, then over time the core should probably lose mass as heat. Fission decay over time means 1 dense molecule would be split into 2 lighter molecules plus radiation emissions (+heat) in some decay chains.

“Density decay” of every planet through radioactive decay is not a new concept, but has not been explained well in terms of a potential volume expansion. The core is an accumulation of the densest elements, and radioactive decay over time will produce lighter elements. These are pushed to the outer core as their density has decreased through “Mass defect” energy equations.

This means that although the overall mass number of the two newly created elements when added together is the same as the original mass number (i.e. mass cannot be destroyed), because of the radiation energy created there may be a density reduction in the core via nuclide particle redistribution.

If planets do expand over time from density decay within their core, then the sequential order would be:

1) Core decay is source for mantle magma

2) Magma convection is mass fractionation

3) Plate tectonics are result of fractionation

4) Subduction is effect of planet expansion