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Artist's depiction of a collision between two planetary bodies. Such an impact between Earth and a Mars-sized object likely formed the Moon.. The giant-impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Theia Impact, is an astrogeology hypothesis for the formation of the Moon first proposed in 1946 by Canadian geologist Reginald Daly.
Animation of collision between Earth (blue) and Theia (black), forming the Moon (red and gray). Bodies are not to scale. According to the giant impact hypothesis, Theia orbited the Sun, nearly along the orbit of the proto-Earth, by staying close to one or the other of the Sun-Earth system's two more stable Lagrangian points (i.e., either L 4 or ...
The Moon's heavily cratered far-side. The origin of the Moon is usually explained by a Mars-sized body striking the Earth, creating a debris ring that eventually collected into a single natural satellite, the Moon, but there are a number of variations on this giant-impact hypothesis, as well as alternative explanations, and research continues into how the Moon came to be formed.
A recently discovered asteroid, named 2024 YR4, is now the riskiest asteroid ever detected. NASA has calculated that the space rock has a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, while the European ...
In 2016, astronomers spotted an asteroid about the size of a ferris wheel in an Earth-like orbit around the Sun. Turns out it's actually a chunk of the moon.
An old theory about how Earth’s moon was formed is getting a second look.
When it was first observed, it was about 33 million km (21 million mi; 0.22 AU) from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon) and already heading away from the Sun. ʻOumuamua is a small object estimated to be between 100 and 1,000 metres (300 and 3,000 ft) long, with its width and thickness both estimated between 35 and 167 metres (115 ...
An asteroid called 2020 CD3 was bound to Earth for several years before leaving the planet's orbit in 2020 and another called 2022 NX1 became a mini-moon of Earth in 1981 and 2022 and will return ...