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If the Earth was melting at the moment of impact, it could possibly produce the moon we see today. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)
In the last few decades, if you asked an astronomer how the moon was created, they would almost tell you that a world the size of Mars, dubbed Theia, is crushed on the primitive Earth, sending a cloud of debris up into the space where it is soldered. our silver satellite. And there is strong evidence to support this idea.
But dig deeper and you'll discover thorny issues with the theory. Almost all models of the giant impact imply that the moon must still contain a lot of Theia. But the more the researchers study the chemical composition of the rocks of the Earth and the Moon, the more the two bodies are similar, without trace of the chemical footprints of Theia.
Now, a new study reimagined this impact with Theia by slamming on Earth and showing that if our world was covered with a huge ocean of magma, it could solve the long-standing questions about the formation of the moon.
Deep impact
In recent decades, many arguments in favor of moon formation have focused on very specific details of the Earth-Theia collision. But these little details have big consequences.
If the two objects were in a frontal collision, a sufficient amount of debris could have been mixed to explain the similar composition of the Earth and the Moon. But if you do these calculations, orbital calculations just do not work because the moon can not get into the orbit we see today. If instead, astronomers change the collision into a side scan, you can recreate the moon's orbit, but you still have a moon that should contain much more Theia than we have observed. Another solution is to accept that Theia may have been made from the same materials in the same proportions as the Earth, but many astronomers are uncomfortable with a coincidence.
Read more: Everything you need to know about the moons of our solar system
Now, Natsuki Hosono, from the Japan Agency for Marine and Earth Sciences, and a team of researchers have published a new theory on Nature Geoscience who tries a different solution. They suggest that if the Earth was melted at the time of the collision of Theia, instead of being solid, many more Earth materials could be ejected into space, leaving the Moon mainly composed of our planet. and not Theia.
The variation of the well-known impact story on the Molten Earth could also solve the problem of one of the few compositional differences between the Earth and its moon. The moon has a much higher concentration of iron oxide (FeO) than the Earth. But if large parts of the Earth were melted into liquid, this ocean of magma should contain a large amount of iron oxide in relation to the Earth as a whole. Theia slamming into this ocean would send him into space, where he could merge into the moon that we see today.
The Hosono team used more detailed modeling than many previous projects to show their work, which gave them some weight. But it is unlikely that the study is the last word of such an ancient debate about the exact origin of our moon.
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