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The precursor of our planet, the proto-Earth, formed within a time span of approximately five million years, shows a new study from the Centre for Star and Planet Formation (StarPlan) at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen, The Geology page reports.

As the source said, on an astronomical scale, this is extremely fast, the researchers explain.

The results from StarPlan break with the traditional theory that the proto-Earth formed by random collisions between larger and larger planetary bodies throughout several tens of millions of years - equivalent to about 5-15 minutes out of the above-mentioned fictional 24 hours of formation.

Instead, the new results support a more recent, alternative theory about the formation of planets through the accretion of cosmic dust. The study’s lead author, Associate Professor Martin Schiller, explains it as follows: “The other idea is that we start from dust, essentially.

Millimetre-sized objects, all coming together, raining down on the growing body and making the planet in one go,” he says, adding: “Not only is this implication of the rapid formation of the Earth interesting for our solar system. It is also interesting to assess how likely it is for planets to form somewhere else in the galaxy.”