A closer look
Before Earth was a giant sphere of rock, it was nothing more than a swirling disk of microscopic silicate dust orbiting a young Sun. The great mystery was how these tiny grains combined without just bouncing off each other in the vacuum of space. It turns out that simple static electricity, generated by the friction of cosmic dust violently crashing together, provided the exact electrostatic glue needed to bind microscopic specks into the massive planetary boulders that eventually forged our solar system.
