How exactly was our moon formed? This question has baffled many scientists for several years. Since the 1970s, astronomers have suspected that the moon arose when a giant protoplanet called Theia struck Earth. However, the nature of this collision and what happened immediately after it has been a matter of debate.
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, some scientists believe that the collision created a vast cloud of debris, which merged into the moon over time, however, in a new study, researchers from Durham University claimed that the giant collision immediately put the moon in orbit around Earth.
“This formation path could help explain the similarity in isotopic composition between lunar rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts and Earth’s mantle,” said study co-author Vincent Ike. Determining the type of collision that occurred further.
The researcher explained, “About 4.45 billion years ago, 150 million years after the formation of the solar system, the Earth was hit by a Mars-sized object called Theia.”
The collision also led to the formation of the Moon, but controversy rages on what exactly happened during this event, and the question of why the Moon and Earth are similar in composition remains a mystery.
The researchers set out to definitively explain the moon’s origin story in the study, as the team used the open-source SWIFT simulation code, running on the DiRAC Memory Intensive service (‘COSMA’), to create the most detailed supercomputer simulation to date.
This allowed them to simulate hundreds of different impacts, varying the angle and speed of the collision as well as the masses and rotations of the two colliding objects.
While previous studies used low-resolution simulations, the additional computational power revealed important new aspects. For example, the high-resolution simulations produced only a moon-like moon, and additional detail showed how its outer layers were richer in Earth-origin material.
If a large portion of the Moon formed immediately after the giant impact, it could mean that less material became molten during formation than previously thought, and depending on how this molten rock solidified, these theories should predict the various internal structures of the Moon.