The Solar System's Element Sorting

This is also inspired by a now-closed thread, "Plate tectonics, mountain building, and the Flood", over in "Geology and the Great Flood".The Solar System has a lot of element sorting. The Sun and the gas-giant planets are mostly hydrogen and helium, the outer-solar-system objects are mostly icy, and the inner-solar-system objects are mostly rocky and iron-nickel.However, this element sorting is produced by simple volatility and differences in temperature.As it formed, the protosun heated its leftover solar nebula. But the inner parts got heated more than the outer parts, meaning that more materials boiled off of the inner than the outer Solar System.Since carbon and oxygen are very cosmically abundant elements, outer planets could grow big enough from water and methane ices to keep hydrogen and helium from escaping from them, thus enabling them to be largely or mostly those elements.And as Jupiter formed, it turned gravitational potential energy into enough heat to make it glow like a weak star; as a result, its Galilean satellites get more and more icy the farther out one goes. Io has no ice, Europa a thin layer of ice, and Ganymede and Callisto thick layers of ice.It is very satisfying to recognize that a simple physical mechanism can easily account for all those features; I wonder if young-earthers have ever bothered to explain that.

Your story is equally, if not more, problematic for the old earthers.When did the Solar System begin its element sorting?When would you estimate the Earth began to form?Would you mind explaining the process by which the earth formed?What would the earth have looked like under your scenario the moment it formed?When evolutionists say the earth is 4.5 billion years old, do they mean that at 4.5 billion years ago the earth formed under your scenario?

Actually, Zephan, the answers are pretty well established for your questions, based on not just element sorting but on distribution of isotopes as well. The solar system started to condense from its parent nebula about 4,580,000,000 years ago, and within a few million years the sun had "ignited" and had clouds of dust, gas, and "pebbles" orbiting it. Clumps of those stuck together, from their mutual gravitational attraction, to form "planetisimals" with sizes of miles to hundreds of miles across. These then collided - out by Jupiter they could stay cool enough (and they collected mass fast enough) to hold on to their hydrogen: here around Earth most of it was cooked off.
The Earth was a pretty much molten ball of iron and rock at first: that's why it now has an iron center with lighter rock as the mantle, and a thin crust of still lighter rocks floating on that. A couple of hundred million years after the proto-earth formed, it apparently collided with another protoplanet, and the splash resulted in the Moon - the moon has very little in the way of an iron core, and the rocks that the Apollo probes brought back show definite kinship to Earth rocks.I'll look for some web sources if work doesn't interfere today.

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When did the Solar System begin its element sorting?

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Long before the Sun started to burn. Gravity would pull elements towards the local dense regions. Once the Sun started to generate heat the major sorting processes began, as was explained in another thread.

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When would you estimate the Earth began to form?

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The oldest dated rock is somewhere around 4.3 billion years old. This date does not represent the beginning of the formation of the Earth, but the end. By this time, the Earth whould have been pretty much fully formed though very different. The beginning of its formation would be much farther back in time. Planets had to get a good start before the Sun ignited or the Solar winds would blow all of the material into deep space; and no material, no planet.

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Would you mind explaining the process by which the earth formed?

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Stuff 'falls' toward the densest region-- the region of highest gravity.

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What would the earth have looked like under your scenario the moment it formed?

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There wouldn't really have been a 'moment' it formed. It would have started out as dust, which became small particles and then a loose collection of rocks, then a big molten ball, then an even bigger molten ball, then a molten ball with a thin cool shell. You have to pick some criteria. What qualifies as 'formed'?

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When evolutionists say the earth is 4.5 billion years old, do they mean that at 4.5 billion years ago the earth formed under your scenario?

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That date is somewhere around the end of the process of matter accretion. It has to be. Rocks have been dated to 3.8 bya and 4.3 bya. The radioactive clocks in the rocks start ticking once the rock cools, so the date cannot be older than that cooling. This means that the date has to be after the Earth has had time to cool significantly.------------------
No webpage found at provided URL: www.hells-handmaiden.com

The oldest Earth rocks are around 3.8 billion years old, with some zircon crystals having an age of around 4.1 billion years. They are found in places like Canada, Greenland, Australia, and southern Africa.However, the oldest Moon rocks are around 4.45 billion years old; they are found in the highlands (the maria are big flood-basalt plains about 4 billion years old). And meteorites' ages are around 4.55 billion years.The meteorites are used to estimate the age of the Solar System because they've been too small to have experienced the sort of reprocessing that many large-body rocks have experienced. They are too small to trap significant amounts of the heat produced by their internal radioactivity.And as to how the Earth formed from the solar nebula, that's simple. As the protosun collapsed, some material was left behind, and it went into orbit around the protosun in a disk. As the protosun reached its final size, it became bright enough to heat the nebula near it enough to drive off icy materials. What was left was rocky materials and iron-nickel. At first, it was all tiny dust grains, but these were somewhat sticky, and as they collided, they tended to form larger and larger masses. The inner Solar System's contents became coarser and coarser, until all that was left from all the collisions was the four inner planets and the Asteroid Belt.

Here's a good age of the earth article:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html

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The oldest rocks on Earth found so far are the Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake (4.03 Ga)...

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and

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In Western Australia, single zircon crystals found in younger sedimentary rocks have radiometric ages of as much as 4.3 billion years, making these tiny crystals the oldest materials to be found on Earth so far.

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In the preCambrian geology class I took a year ago, the prof said that the then new find, in Australian quartzite, was zircon(s) with a 4.404 Ga age date. He went on to point out that that implied that there were pre-existing felsic (ie "granitic") rocks.Moose