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Wang et al. (2026, Nature Astronomy) showed that the moderately-volatile lithophile element (MVLE) depletion patterns of Earth and Mars record different formation pathways: Earth accreted ≳75% of its mass via pebble accretion, Mars ∼73% via collisions of volatile-depleted planetesimals. We reinterpret this result in the information-dynamics (ID) framework, in which self-organization (ε) and dissipation (γ) compete through a single information field of local purity p. A numerical experiment on the published source data (13 elements for bulk silicate Earth, bulk silicate Mars and Vesta) shows that, within the tested formulation, a single mean purity cannot describe the two planets: the fit escapes to unphysical solutions. A purity spectrum fits instead: each planet’s pattern is a mixture over one universal single-purity response law S(T;p), with only the mixture weights differing between bodies. A joint fit with a 4-parameter universal law reproduces all 36 data points with χ²/N = 0.35 (all residuals within 2σ). The inferred spectra mirror the published multi-component decomposition (Earth: 59% strongly-processed + 24% Vesta-like + 17% volatile-rich; Mars: Vesta-like bin dominant), and Vesta concentrates 99% of its weight at a processing temperature of 1116 K, close to the published 1135 ± 35 K. This is an in-sample consistency check, not an independent validation. Read this way, pebble accretion and planetesimal collision occupy different regions of one organizing spectrum. We do not claim this proves a single mechanism. We offer it as a coherent reading that translates the published decomposition into testable predictions for rocky exoplanets and the Moon.
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Huang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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