(February 9, 2018)

„Everyone, ourselves included, seemed to be missing this big problem,“ study author Steven Hauck, a professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, said in a statement. Namely, they were missing „that metals don‘t start crystallizing instantly unless something is there that lowers the energy barrier a lot.“

In chemistry, this extra energy is known as the nucleation barrier: the point at which a compound visibly changes its thermodynamic phase.

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In their paper, the researchers proposed one possibility: Perhaps a massive nugget of solid metal alloy dropped from the mantle and plunged into the liquid core.