Didn't the moon form as a result of a planet colliding with the primitive Earth? Two teams of researchers have developed two very different theories.
UNIVERSITY PARK – When you look up at the night sky, you can usually see it: the moon. It has accompanied the Earth on its path around the Sun for billions of years. Forty years ago, researchers agreed on how the Moon formed. According to this, a small planet called Theia hit the primordial Earth and knocked out a piece of it. Hence the moon. Since the 1984 CONA conference, this theory has become a consensus in research. But a research team from the United States of America is now causing unrest because it proposes a different story for the origin of the moon.
How was the moon formed? The new theory is based on many open questions
And in studying that In the specialized magazine Planetary Science Journal published Darren Williams and Michael Zuger (both of Pennsylvania State University) suggest that the young Earth captured the Moon when it had a close encounter with a binary system in space. “The Kona Conference has been a pioneer for 40 years,” Williams asserts at one of these conferences. He notices. But many questions remain unanswered about the formation of the Moon.
For example, a Moon emerging from a planetary collision and consisting of debris clumped together to form a ring should orbit above the planet's equator. So why does the moon rotate in a different plane? “The Moon is more aligned with the Sun than with the Earth's equator,” Williams says.
Did the Earth steal the moon from another celestial body?
In the new theory, the Earth's gravity separates the two bodies of the binary system from each other and grabs one of the bodies – the Moon. Since then it has become a satellite of Earth, orbiting it in its current orbit. The same thing is said to have happened in other regions of the solar system, Williams points out. For example, Triton, the largest of Neptune's moons: Neptune likely captured it from the Kuiper Belt.
Williams and Zuger say it was possible that Earth could have captured a body larger than the Moon. Even an object the size of Mercury or Mars would have been possible, although its orbit may have been unstable.
The Earth could have captured a body larger than the Moon
For the research team, the moon's orbit is the biggest clue to the slightly different way Earth's satellite formed. According to the calculations, a captured satellite that was previously part of a binary system could behave mathematically in the way our own satellite does. But researchers are not sure that the Moon actually formed this way. Williams asserts: “No one knows how the moon was formed.” For the past four decades, we have only had one possibility as to how it came into being. Now we have two. This opens a treasure trove of new questions and opportunities for further investigation.
The Swiss research team has a different theory about the moon's formation
In fact, there is another theory about the formation of the Moon: A Swiss research team from ETH Zurich says the following: The composition of the Earth and the Moon are too similar for the Moon to be part of the Earth. Therefore, the research team assumes that the two celestial bodies formed from the same material cloud at approximately the same time. The study is On the ArXiv preprint server It can and should be found in the specialized journal 2024 Thesis in Geochemistry It is published. (unpaid bill)
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