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LiveScience
LiveScience
Elizabeth Howell

Cataclysmic crash with neighboring planet may be the reason there's life on Earth today, new studies hint

Illustration of protoplanet crashing into Earth.

Early Earth was a barren wasteland incapable of supporting life until a big protoplanet crash carried in the necessary ingredients, a new study suggests.

That collision of the proto-Earth and a Mars-size body — nicknamed Theia — has been theorized for decades, especially in discussions of how our moon may have formed from the resulting pieces of the crash.

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