SPACE — Earth and the moon are not only close in distance, but also have a bewildering relationship of interactions. The moon comes with its shady rays when the Earth is left out of the sun. Perhaps, the same goes for the moon, on its cold dark side.
The search for an unusual chain of relationships between the moon and the earth has been carried out for a long time, especially in the era of modern astronomy. However, scientists are still unsure about how the moon actually formed. The moon was born one hundred million years after the creation of the solar system. That is, the moon is not involved in the process of forming the planets. This makes scientists wonder, what causes the birth of our planet’s satellite.
There are at least three of the best theories currently explaining the birth of the night light. Here is the explanation.
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Giant Collision Hypothesis
The theory that is currently widely used and supported by the scientific community is the giant collision hypothesis. This theory suggests that the moon formed when an object hit the young Earth. Like other planets, Earth was formed from the remnants of a cloud of dust and gas orbiting the young sun. The early solar system was a cruel place, filled with a number of giant objects that failed to become planets. One of them fell to Earth, not long after our planet celebrated its creation.
Known as Theia, the Mars-sized object violently crashed into Earth, throwing pieces of the young planet’s crust that evaporated into space. Gravity binds all ejected particles together, creating the largest spherical object in the solar system in relation to its parent planet: the created moon.
This kind of formation would explain why the moon is mostly made up of lighter elements, making it less dense than Earth. That’s because the materials that make it up come from the Earth’s crust, while the rocky core of the Earth is left untouched. As the matter gathered, they were centered near the plane of the Earth’s ecliptic, where the moon is currently orbiting.
“When the young Earth and this naughty body (theia) collided, the energy involved was 100 million times greater than the event believed to have destroyed the dinosaurs,” NASA said.
Although this is the most popular theory, it still has holes in it. Most modeling suggests that more than 60 percent of the lunar material should consist of material from Theia. While rock samples from the Apollo missions show the opposite. Apollo actually indicated that the moon was the broken ‘rib’ of the Earth. Matching pair.
“In terms of composition, the Earth and the moon are almost twins. The compositions differ by only a few parts in a million,” Alessandra Mastrobuono-Battisti, an astrophysicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa told Space.com.
“This (modeling and Apollo) contradiction has cast a long shadow on the giant collision model,” he said.
2020 research published in Nature Geoscience, offers an explanation for why the moon and earth have a similar composition. After studying the oxygen isotopes in lunar rocks brought to Earth from Apollo astronauts, researchers found that there were small differences when compared to Earth rocks. The samples collected from the moon’s inner mantle (the layer below the crust), are much heavier than those found on Earth. The material is said to have an isotopic composition that best represents the impactor, Theia.
Back in 2017, Israeli researchers proposed an alternative collision theory suggesting that a rain of tiny debris fell on Earth to create the moon. “The double impact scenario is a more natural way to explain the formation of the moon,” Raluca Rufu, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and lead author of the study, told the BBC. Space.com.
“In the early stages of the solar system, impacts (collisions) were very abundant. Therefore, it was more natural for several common impactors to form the moon, rather than one particular (Theia),” he said.
Joint Formation
The moon can also form together with its parent planet. Under such an explanation, gravity would have caused the matter in the early solar system to be attracted together as particles. Then gravitationally bound together to form the Earth. The moon that formed at the same time as Earth would have a very similar composition to this planet. It will also explain the current location of the moon.
However, although Earth and the moon share much of the same matter, the moon is much denser than our planet. It most likely wouldn’t have happened if the two had started with the same heavy element at their core.
In 2012, researcher Robin Canup, of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, proposed that Earth and the moon formed at the same time two massive bodies five times the size of Mars collided. “After colliding, two similarly sized objects then collided again, forming the early Earth which was surrounded by a disk of material that coalesced to form the moon,” he said. The re-collision and subsequent merging left two spheres with a similar chemical composition seen today.
Catch Theory
In this theory, Earth’s gravity holds back objects passing by, as is the case with other moons in the solar system. Call it the moons on Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Under this capture theory, rocky bodies that form elsewhere in the solar system could be pulled into orbit around Earth.
The capture theory would explain the differences in the composition of the Earth and its moons. However, such orbiters are often oddly shaped, instead of round objects like our beautiful moon. Then, the path of such an object tends not to be parallel to the ecliptic of its parent planet, so it is not similar to the moon.
Video: Moon Surface in 4K
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRg8qy7VZp4
Although co-formation theory and capture theory explain some elements of the moon’s existence, they leave too many questions unanswered or unanswered. On the other hand, the giant collision hypothesis has answered most questions about the moon. This makes it the best model according to scientific evidence of how the moon was created.
Source: Space.com
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