A new study says the Moon could have formed immediately after the impact between Earth and Theia. High-res simulations show how.
Not so fast. There’ve always been problems with this hypothesis. Can a new study answer them?
But that was all before science got going. Science improved things a little, like when the British astronomer William Herschel said the Moon was inhabited, and he watched through his telescope as the Martians constructed things. He was wrong, but at least he was using a telescope. And after World War 2, some thought that Nazi astronauts had already landed on the Moon and were living in a top-secret base. Only slightly more plausible.
Since then, generations of scientists have developed the Giant Impact Hypothesis. But they’ve also pointed out the holes in that hypothesis. One of the holes is in the initial finding that Earth and the Moon share isotope signatures. That means they had to come from the same source. But for that to happen, the impactor would’ve had to have the same isotope signature. That’s not likely because lighter elements were dispersed by the stellar wind in the early, still-forming Solar System.
The researchers used advances in computational power to run simulations of impacts with Earth at higher resolutions than ever before. These simulations show that the impact between Earth and Theia was much different than the Giant Impact Hypothesis. Instead of an impact casting a vast amount of molten material into space that condensed into the Moon over a longer timeframe, the simulation shows that the impact created the Moon by sending a single satellite immediately into orbit.
A new NASA and Durham University simulation puts forth a different theory of the Moon’s origin – the Moon may have formed in a matter of hours when material from the Earth and a Mars sized-body was launched directly into orbit after the impact. Credit: NASA/ Durham University/Jacob Kegerreis There’s also the issue of the Moon’s orbit. It’s tilted relative to Earth’s equator by about 5 degrees, and the instant satellite explanation can account for that. “In contrast,” the authors explain, “we find that an impact onto a spinning target with angular momentum misaligned to that of Theia’s orbit can readily produce significantly inclined debris, including a satellite, as illustrated in Figure 5.
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