What made metals form into large veins in Earth’s crust?
In: Planetary Science
When the universe was much younger, stars in this area of the universe got big and cooked a lot of different stuff inside them. Some were big enough to explode in a super nova. That explosion left weird stuff behind like heavy metals. Those metals shot out into space and made clouds of dust.
All the bits of metal were heavy though, so they have more gravity, which attracts them to one another. Heavy stuff pulls other heavy stuff towards it. So the big blobs of metals and such smash together to form bigger blobs, some of which are ALL made of one metal.
Eventually, all the bits and pieces in this area started forming things that were big enough to be planets and a star called the sun. Inside the planets there are still the big blobs of metal from the old blown up star, buried under all the other rocks and stuff that form the planet.
The planet is pretty heavy. And heavy stuff has gravity like we saw before. It pulls itself inward and that pressure makes it really hot inside. Hot enough that some rock is liquid, and it moves! This causes the stuff near the center to float around. And the stuff above moves with it, like it’s floating. It moves around a lot and bangs into other stuff floating on top of the molten rock, causing it to break up and smear and stretch around into veins
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