The Moon might be older than scientists previously thought ' a new study shines light on its history
A physicist, a chemist and a mathematician walk into a bar. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but in my case, it was the start of an idea that could reshape how scientists think about the history of the Moon. The three of us were all interested in the Moon, but from different perspectives: As a geophysicist, I thought about its interior; Thorsten Kleine studied its chemistry; and Alessandro Morbidelli wanted to know what the Moon's formation could tell us about how the planets were assembled 4.5 billion years ago. At a conference in Hawaii in the late 1980s, a group of scientists solved the problem of how the Moon formed. Their research suggested that a Mars-size object crashed into the early Earth, jettisoning molten material into space. That glowing material coalesced into the body now called the Moon. This story explained many things. For one, the Moon has very little material that evaporates easily, such as water, because it began life molten. It has only a tiny iron core,...
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