What makes Earth’s core hot? Why isn’t it just a cold blob made up of metal and minerals?
In: Earth Science
It will become a cold blob made up of metals and minerals eventually, it’s just so phenomenally large that it takes a very very long time to cool down.
The Earth was formed quite a long time ago by a bunch of space rocks smashing together. When space rocks smash together, they heat up, because collisions produce heat (search youtube for “slapping a chicken until it’s cooked” for an amusing demonstration of this). Get a lot of space rocks smashing together over a long period of time and the resulting big space lump gets so massive and so hot it rearranges itself into a roughly spherical shape under gravity and separates out into layers based on density.
Hot things cool down. You can observe this by for example boiling some water, pouring it into a mug and just waiting. It just takes a really long time for big things to cool down. Takes even longer when the big thing has the equivalent of a bunch of nuclear generators inside it generating extra heat.
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