The moon and Earth formed from the same molten material.
The hypothesis suggests that the Earth and Moon formed from the same molten material.
The new model proposed by researchers from the University of California at Davis, helps to explain why the Earth and Moon have very similar chemical composition.
The moon has a relatively large size, if you compare it with other satellites of the planets the size of Earth, it consists almost entirely of the same material as the Earth, minus a certain number of volatile compounds that evaporate into space in antiquity. This makes the moon a unique object in the Solar system, said Sarah Stewart, Professor, University of California, Davis, USA, and lead author of the new work.
“All the other celestial bodies of the Solar system have different chemical composition,” she said.
According to the most popular hypothesis, the Moon formed at sliding collision with Earth of a space object about the size of Mars, in which a part of molten rock “splashed”, forming the moon, which once formed, is gradually moving away from Earth. In the new study, Stewart and her colleagues have proposed a scenario that includes the hypothesis of a giant impact, but significantly different from other, more well-known scenarios of the collision.
The main difference of the new version is that the collision will be more energetic, therefore, mixing Earth and space of the guest is more intense, which explains the proximity of chemical compositions of the materials of the Earth and moon.
The land in this case after the collision is inclined to the plane of the Ecliptic at an angle of 75 degrees, and the Moon moving away from Earth oscillates with respect to this plane, until it reaches its current orbit is tilted 5 degrees relative to the Equatorial plane of the Earth.
