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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.
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 ...
By measuring the age of the rocks, scientists learned that the moon formed about 4.5 billion years ago, amidst the chaotic early years of our Solar System’s own formation. Today’s tools and ...
The research suggests that lunar rock samples from the Apollo missions date to an event that melted the moon's surface — not to the moment it formed. The authors therefore think the moon formed ...
The first soil samples from the moon, collected during the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ‘70s, effectively rewrote science textbooks, revealing how the moon formed and that it was once ...
The Pre-Nectarian period is defined from the point at which the lunar crust formed, to the time of the Nectaris impact event. Nectaris is a multi-ring impact basin that formed on the near side of the Moon, and its ejecta blanket serves as a useful stratigraphic marker. 30 impact basins from this period are recognized, the oldest of which is the South Pole–Aitken basin.
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 ...