'Fiery solar system burned up carbon'

Though our planet supports carbon-based life, it has a mysterious carbon deficit, but the element is thousands of times more abundant in comets in the outer solar system than on the earth, even the sun is rich in carbon.

The conventional explanation for the deficit is that in the inner region of the dust disc where earth formed, temperatures soared above 1800 kelvin, enough for carbon to boil away, journal New Scientist reported.

But observations of developing solar systems suggested that at earth’s distance from the sun, the temperature would be too cool to vapourise carbon dust.

Now a team of astronomers from Sejong University in Seoul and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor wrote in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” that fire sweeping through the inner solar system had “scorched away much of the carbon from earth and the other inner planets”.

“Hot oxygen atoms in the dusty disc would have readily combined with carbon, burning it to produce carbon dioxide and other gases,” said Jeong-Eun Lee of Sejong University.