Abstract
RECENTLY McCrea1 argued that the near equality of the densities of a combined Mercury–Venus aggregate with an Earth–Mars–Moon aggregate is a remarkable result which indicates that the two bodies should have effectively identical chemical composition. Because the densities of the individual planets correlate neither with their mass nor with their distance to the Sun, he argued that this near-equality of densities of the two aggregates strongly supports Lyttleton's theory2 of planetary formation by break-up of two bodies.
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References
McCrea, W. H., Nature, 224, 28 (1969).
Lyttleton, R. A., Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 121, 551 (1960); Mysteries of the Solar System (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968); Science J., 5, 53 (May 1969).
Kaula, W. M., An Introduction to Planetary Physics: The Terrestrial Planets (J. Wiley and Sons, New York, 1968).
Ringwood, A. E., Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta, 30, 41 (1966).
Kovach, R. L., and Anderson, D. L., J. Geophys. Res., 70, 2873 (1965).
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JAMIESON, J., SMITH, J. Chemical Homogeneity of Groups of Terrestrial Planets. Nature 225, 354–355 (1970). https://doi.org/10.1038/225354a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/225354a0
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