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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.
The generally accepted model of the moon’s creation assumes that a massive object, dubbed Theia, crashed directly into Earth 4.51 billion years ago, when our planet was still busy growing to its ...
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 ...
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.
Geological studies of the Moon are based on a combination of Earth-based telescope observations, measurements from orbiting spacecraft, lunar samples, and geophysical data. . Six locations were sampled directly during the crewed Apollo program landings from 1969 to 1972, which returned 382 kilograms (842 lb) of lunar rock and lunar soil to Earth [8] In addition, three robotic Soviet Luna ...
Scientists for the first time have spotted a moon-forming region around a planet beyond our solar system - a Jupiter-like world surrounded by a disk of gas and dust massive enough that it could ...
According to David H. Levy, Shoemaker "saw the craters on the Moon as logical impact sites that were formed not gradually, in eons, but explosively, in seconds." [ 3 ] Lunar craters as captured through the backyard telescope of an amateur astronomer, partially illuminated by the sun on a waning crescent moon.
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.