[ad_1]
For more than a century, scientists have been arguing over the formation of the moon on Earth. But researchers from Yale and Japan say that they could have the answer.
Many theorists believe that an object of the size of Mars was projected onto the primitive Earth and that the materials dislodged from this collision were at the base of the moon. When this idea was tested in computer simulations, it turned out that the moon would be made primarily from the impact. Yet the opposite is true. By analyzing the reported rocks of the Apollo missions, we know that the moon is mainly composed of Earth materials.
A new study published on April 29 in Nature Geoscience, co-written by the Yale geophysicist, Shun-ichiro Karato, offers an explanation.
The key, according to Karato, is that the early Proto-Earth – about 50 million years after the formation of the Sun – was covered with a sea of hot magma, while the impact was in solid material. Karato and his collaborators set out to test a new model, based on the collision of a proto-Earth covered with an ocean of magma and a solid impacting object.
The model showed that after the collision, the magma is heated much more than the impact solids. The researchers say that the magma then grows and enters orbit to form the moon. This explains why there are many more materials of the Earth in the composition of the moon. The previous models did not take into account the different degree of heating between the proto-terrestrial silicate and the impactor.
"In our model, about 80% of the moon is made up of proto-terrestrial materials," said Karato, who has done a lot of research on the chemical properties of proto-earthy magma. "In most previous models, about 80% of the moon is made up of the impactor – it's a big difference."
Karato said the new model confirmed earlier theories on moon formation, without the need to propose unconventional collision conditions, which theorists had to do so far.
For the study, Karato led the research on molten silicate compression. A group from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the RIKEN Center for Computer Science has developed a computer model to predict how the materials resulting from the collision have become the moon.
The first author of the study is Natsuki Hosono of RIKEN. Other co-authors are Junichiro Makino and Takayuki Saitoh.
Source of the story:
Material provided by Yale University. Original written by Jim Shelton. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
[ad_2]
Source link