Slight hijack (Sorry.): Why is that?
I wonder if Kevin Costner would be hailed as a deity by the indigenous poulation.
In our case, the best guess I’ve heard is that we lost most of our atmosphere in the collision which formed the Moon, but I don’t know what the current state of knowledge is.
A while back we had a thread where it was cited that an iron bar dropped in a bottomless ocean would stop sinking at 600 miles. Would tath compressed core be uniform or would it create it’s own type of plate tectonics?
Or would that be created by the probablility that a world cool enough to keep liquid - not vaporized - water would also have frozen water not too far down. Again, would there still be ice layer plate tectonics?
Would that mean constant tsunamis, as well as other huge weather-creation issues that would make things impossible for humans?
Wouldn’t a buch of space debris eventually accumulate, sink below the surface but form crusts at a certain depth density, creating more issues?
And if the planet doesn’t have a molten core, but a frozen one, what happens to the ice? Does it constantly break up and float, icebergs like breaching wales the size of mountain ranges, drifting to swirl around at the poles? What about all the nightly freezing on the side of the planet as rotates away from sunlight?
There’s probably all kinds of fluid dynamics besides all the rest of that.
It’s probably misleading to call the core “frozen”: It’d be solid water, but solid by virtue of pressure, not by virtue of temperature. It’d be denser than liquid water, unlike normal ice-1, and at about the same temperature as the rest of the planet. Nor would the night side freeze, unless the planet’s rotation was a lot slower than the Earth’s, for the same reason that surface water on the Earth mostly doesn’t freeze overnight.