There are many theories about how the Moon formed. The most popular hypotheses are that the Moon formed from the debris of a collision, which accumulated in orbit over months or years.
Another theory is that the Moon may have formed immediately, in just a few hours, when material from Earth and Theia (an object about the size of Mars) were launched into orbit directly after the impact.
Jacob Kageres, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, and lead author of the paper on these results published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said, “This opens up a whole new range of possible starting locations for the Moon’s evolution. ” ,
“We went into this project not knowing what the results of these high-resolution simulations would be. So, while the big eye-opener is that while standard resolutions can give you misleading answers, it was extra exciting that the new results in orbit. could include a moon-like satellite.”
However, there is still no solid theory about how the Moon was formed.
Other theories have been proposed to explain these similarities in composition, such as the synestia model – where the Moon formed inside a circle of vaporized rock by collision – but these arguably struggle to explain the Moon’s current orbit.
This fast, single-step formation theory provides a cleaner and more elegant explanation for both of these outstanding issues. It could also lead to new ways of finding answers to other unsolved mysteries. This scenario could put the Moon in an elongated orbit with an interior that is not completely molten, potentially explaining properties such as the Moon’s tilted orbit and thin crust – making it the best known yet for the Moon’s origin. Makes one of the tempting explanations.
Confirming which of these theories is correct will require analysis of future lunar samples for study from NASA’s future Artemis missions. As scientists gain access to samples from other parts of the Moon and from beneath the Moon’s surface, they will be able to compare how real-world data match these simulated scenarios, and what they indicate. Give a billion-year history of how the Moon has evolved over itself.
In addition to learning more about the Moon, these studies could bring us closer to understanding how our own Earth has become the life-saving world we are today.
“The more we learn about how the Moon came about, the more we discover about our Earth’s evolution,” said Vincent Eck, a researcher at Durham University and a co-author on the paper. “Their histories are intertwined—and may be echoed in the stories of other planets altered by similar or very different collisions.”
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