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The Moon May Have Formed Intact Just Hours After a Giant Collision
Researchers say temperature and material strength could let the Moon form intact within five hours of the giant impact.
- Researchers from the Southwest Research Institute and the University of Arizona published a study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters revealing that material strength and temperature were crucial in determining how the Moon formed about 4.5 billion years ago.
- Early models treated the collision between Earth and Theia as a fluid event, ignoring geologic strength; new models now incorporate temperature-dependent structural properties to better analyze the impact.
- Lead author Adeene Denton found that an intact Moon could emerge within around 5 hours under certain conditions, rather than forming slowly from debris, depending on whether colliding planets were hotter and weaker or cooler and stronger.
- Robin Canup, vice president of Solar System Science at SwRI, noted these results imply a connection between the Moon's physical properties today and the thermal state of Earth and Theia during the giant impact, potentially constraining the timing.
- Study co-author Namya Baijal stated that understanding geophysical states provides new exploration methods for the impact's conditions, though models still struggle to explain why Earth and the Moon share remarkably similar compositions.
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The Moon may have formed intact just hours after a giant collision
Scientists have discovered that the Moon-forming collision may have depended heavily on how hot and physically strong early Earth and Theia were. New simulations found that some impacts create the familiar disk of debris that later becomes the Moon, while others can produce an intact Moon in only about five hours. The results challenge the long-standing assumption that the enormous collision could be modeled as if both worlds behaved mostly like…
·Encinitas, United States
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New modelling reveals that moon formation could have taken place in just a few hours after the giant impact.
The moon may have formed just five hours after the cataclysmic collision between Earth and a long-lost protoplanet, new simulations show.
·Novi Beograd, Serbia
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Leaning Left0Leaning Right0Center2Last UpdatedBias Distribution100% Center
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