Dowhen it was formed Moon? Y What? According to NASA, it was billions of years ago.
At that time, there was a version of our Earth that looked very different from today hit by an object the size of Marscalled Teia. and from that shock the moon was formed.
But, as the US agency indicates in its blog, this collision “is a scientific puzzle that researchers have been studying for decades, with no conclusive answer.
How the Moon was formed: theories and news
Most theories hold that the moon it was formed from the rubble of this shockmerging into orbit for months or years.
Now, however, a new simulation proposes a different perspective: the moon it may have formed immediately within a few hourswhen material from Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact.
In this sense, Jacob KegerreisNASA researcher Ames Center, published in an article on The letters of the astrophysical diary that “this opens up to completely new range of possible starting points for evolution of the moon“.
“We entered this project not knowing what the results of these were high resolution simulationstherefore, it was exciting that the results could include a tantalizing moon-like satellite in orbit”, Explained the expert.
As detailed on the NASA website, the simulations employed in this research are some of the most detailed of their kind and work with the higher resolution of any simulation performed to study the origins of moon or other giant impacts.
Thanks to this superior computing power, it has been shown that low resolution simulations they can important aspects are missing of these types of collisions.
Instead, they allow researchers to see how new behaviors emerge in a way that previous studies simply couldn’t see.
The history of the Moon and its formation: scientific puzzle
understand the origins of the moon requires the use of what we know about our natural satellite – its mass, its orbit, and the precise analysis of lunar rock samples – to come up with theories based on find out how and where it was created.
So far, it has been an outstanding mystery because the composition of the Moon is so similar to that of the Earth. To do this, scientists can study the composition of a material based on its isotopic signature – a chemical clue to how and where an object originated.
The lunar samples that the scientists studied in the lab show very strong isotope signatures. similar to rocks on Earthunlike rocks on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system.
This makes it likely that much of the material that makes up the moon they originally come from Earth, NASA said on its website.
As for the theory of Teia and the Landpresumably the space object was sprayed into orbit and mixed with some material from our planet to create the Moonin particular their outer layers, which could help explain this compositional similarity.
But they have also been proposed other theories to explain these similarities in composition, such as the synaesthesia modelin which the Moon is formed within a rock vortex vaporized by the collision, but it could be said that they did difficulty in explaining the current orbit of our satellite.
For the Space Agency, “getting closer to confirming which of these theories is correct will require the analysis of future lunar samples brought to Earth for the study of the next. researches of artemide“.
Therefore, as scientists have access to samples from other parts (and depths) of the moon, they will be able to compare how real-world data matches these simulated scenarios. And find out what do they indicate about how the Moon evolved in its millions of years of history.
Furthermore, and beyond the simple knowledge of the Moon, these studies can bring us closer to understanding how our Earth became the world that sustains the life it is today.
“The more we learn about how the moonmore we find out on theThe evolution of our Earth. Their stories are intertwined and could be repeated in the stories of other planets changed by similar or very different collisions, ”said Vincent Eke, researcher at Durham University and co-author of the paper.
Source: Clarin
