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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.
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.
The competing theories were: volcanic eruptions blasting holes in the Moon; meteoric impact; a theory known as the Welteislehre developed in Germany between the two world wars which suggested glacial motion creating the craters. Grove Karl Gilbert suggested in 1893 that the Moon's craters were formed by large asteroid impacts.
“The chlorine loss from the moon likely happened during a high-energy and heat event, which points to the Giant Impact theory,” Gargano, one of the lead researchers, says in a NASA press release.
A co-formation of Earth and the Moon together in the primordial accretion disk does not explain the depletion of metals in the Moon. [40] None of these hypotheses can account for the high angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system. [42] The prevailing theory is that the Earth–Moon system formed after a giant impact of a Mars-sized body ...
There are many theories about how the moon formed, but scientists mostly agree that about 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-size object or a series of objects crashed into Earth and launched enough ...
The formation of the Moon billions of years ago is cloaked in mystery. Most astronomers believe the young Earth, still cooling off from its formation, was struck by a mars-sized body called Theia ...
Theia (/ ˈ θ iː ə /) is a hypothesized ancient planet in the early Solar System which, according to the giant-impact hypothesis, collided with the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, with some of the resulting ejected debris coalescing to form the Moon.