How do scientists know what the core of the Earth is made of, even though we’ve never drilled anywhere near that deep?
In: Planetary Science
When you flick an empty cup, it makes a different sound than when you flick a cup full of water.
This is the basic principle of how we know the make up of things that we can’t see. You’ve experienced enough empty cups and full cups to know the sound w/o looking at the cup.
So basically, we have a bunch of data on what’s going on under our feet. Some of it is for things you can see, and some of it for things you cannot see.
However, we can look at the ones we can see and say “pretty consistently, our tools read XYZ measurements when vibrations travel through THIS material, and read ABC measurements when traveling through THAT material, and looking at this data from stuff we can’t see, we see some amount of XYZ before it turns into ABC, so we’ll estimate that there’s some amount of THIS and then there’s some amount of THAT.”
It’s also worth mentioning that this is a similar extrapolation to how we estimate the make up of celestial bodies. Like we can tell if a planet is rocky or not from a different star system? How??
It’s because for the bodies that we DO know the make up for (i.e. the ones closest to us), we see the kind of signatures they put off. Mars and Jupiter have drastically different data when we use all of the instruments we have to measure them, and if we look at a planet light years away we can say “hmm, that one reacts more like Jupiter to our instruments than it does like Mars”.
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