Planet Earth - the early years, I mean the really early years

Hello there and welcome - the last five posts have taken you, the reader, as well as me; the writer who has sneakily used other people's work to take you from that point of 10^–43 seconds after the Big Bang Event (BBE) to an estimated time of 9.2 billion after the BBE. Yes, of course I have taken necessary steps to simplify parts and if you would like to add some descriptions in the comment section below this post.

So, of course, our next question or at least the path of where we gain our next part of the history of Whatlington and Vinehall Street is how did planet Earth form from the stellar material (or supernovae) that is ejected from collapsing old stars. It should also be stated, at this point, that the current estimated age of Earth is 4.578 billion years and those kind compilers at Wikipedia, as you can guess, have designed a geological clock (see below) on which I base the next section of the Whatlington and Vinehall Street Archive. We are often reminded that three is the magic number, the age of Earth is approximately one third of the age of the Universe.

(Click on the image to see a better view)

It is purported that certain planets in our solar system were formed from the solar nebula, the disc shaped cloud of dust and gas, whereby dust grains start to orbit around what may be described as a protostar - a contracting mass of gas that represents the beginning of a star - his process is known as accretion. The accretion of the dust grains leads to clumps reaching sizes of up to 200 metres, these larger clumps bind together to form planetesimals - a minute planet of up to 10 kilometres in size. With increasing accretion due to gravitational force, these planetesimals increased in size by centimetres over the millions of years. 

Due to the position of Earth, and the other terrestrial planets, in relation to the Sun - volatile molecules were unable to condense such as methane and water. However the planetesimals could only form elements with high melting points including such metals as iron (Fe), nickel (Ni) and aluminium (Al) and rocky compounds such as silicates (SiO₄). But due to the low presence of these metals and compounds in the solar nebula, they form 0.6% of the solar nebula, the so-called terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) were limited to being of a smaller size compared to the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). The liquid metals started to sink towards the mass's centre of the proto planet that would be known as Earth. This led to an event entitled the Iron Catastrophe, a supposed date of this event is 500 million years into the formation of Earth, where the collection of iron and nickel at the central mass led to the separation of the mantle and core. This led to the layered structure of Earth and its magnetic field. 

Before I leave you today, a cloud of gaseous silica was said to have surrounded the planet like an early form of atmosphere, this cloud would condense and form the rocks on the Earth's surface. This led to another form of atmosphere that was created when the proto Earth had increased its size to approximately 40% of today's size by accretion - thus the force of gravitational attraction retained a proto atmosphere that also stored water.

Have a good day and thus we travel further on to the Hadean and Archaean Eons next time.