Moon Formed in Mere Hours After Catastrophic Collision of Planets, New Study Suggests

For almost five decades.....astronomers have believed that the Moon was created after Earth collided with a protoplanet called Theia. However, a new model has shed light on exactly how this may have happened. The paper published in The Astrophysical Journal letter suggests that it was formed immediately after the protoplanet Theia crashed into our planet. The simulations used in this research are some of the most detailed of their kind, operating at the highest resolution of any simulation run to study the moon’s origins or other giant impacts, said a NASA release.

"What we have learned is that it is very hard to predict how much resolution you need to simulate these violent and complex collisions reliably – you simply have to keep testing until you find that increasing the resolution even further stops making a difference to the answer you get," Jacob Kegerreis, a computational cosmologist at Durham University in England, told the press.

Conclusion of Theories :

  Earlier theories could explain some aspects of the properties of the moon quite well such as its mass and orbit with major caveats.

In this theory, more earth material is used to create the moon, particularly its outer layers, which helps explain this similarity in composition.

There have been other theories proposed to explain these similarities in composition, such as the synestia model (where the moon is formed inside a swirl of vapourised rock from the collision) but these arguably struggle to explain the moon’s current orbit.

This faster, single-stage formation theory could also lead to answers for other mysteries, potentially explaining properties like the moon’s tilted orbit and thin crust.

As scientists gain access to samples from other parts of the moon and deeper beneath the moon’s surface, simulated scenarios will be able to indicate how the moon has evolved over billions of years.

“The more we learn about how the moon came to be, the more we discover about the evolution of our earth,” said Vincent Eke, a researcher at Durham University and a co-author of the paper.