The moon of the earth in ancient times was considered a divinity, although now we see it as something so common in the night sky that we usually appreciate it as extraordinary, to begin with it is very large it is the fifth largest satellite in the solar system, surpassed only by ganymede, titan, callisto and io, all satellites of gas giants and this makes our moon even more strange no rocky planet has anything like mercury and venus have no moons and mars has two but they are little more than large asteroids.
Our moon is proportionally the largest with respect to its planet in the entire solar system, which is why we usually talk about the earth/moon system, the only similar thing we know is the Pluto/Charon system, but Pluto is now a dwarf planet and both it and its satellite are much smaller than the earth than our own Moon.
The moon next to Pluto is huge in fact if the moon instead of orbiting the Earth would orbit the sun it would surely be considered a planet and that is because our moon, like the planets, is a body structured in layers, with a metallic core mainly iron followed by a semi-solid mantle, a rigid mantle and a solid crust, but if the rocky planets of the solar system have nothing like our moon, the question is what happened where the moon came from.
NASA just released new research from Durham University led by Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.
The research does not change the initial part of the most accepted theory about the formation of the moon which also explains why the Earth has a large core, the research believes that the moon formed during the early days of the solar system's existence after of a collision between the Earth and a primitive planet or protoplanet that they have called theia, which would have the size similar to that of Mars, this supposes that this was already a world of about 6,000 kilometers in diameter, the most accepted theory is that it was formed at one of the lagrange points within the orbit of the earth.
When it comes to creating a star system, what matters to the universe is the star, the planets are a secondary effect made with leftovers, in our case the sun concentrates 99.86% of the mass of the entire solar system.
We are formed by the dust that was saved from being swallowed by the sun and that was trapped in an orbit of about 150 million kilometers from our star, initially that dust would form a ring but then it accumulated in stable points of the orbit, in the main point formed the earth and there are two other important points called lagrangian points where the material accumulated.
It is assumed that theia was formed at the lagrangian point 4 or perhaps at 5, for a time the two worlds in formation existed in the same orbit, the earth and theia, but that stability would not be forever and in the orbit of the Earth there was only room for one planet so the two worlds ended up colliding.
Most of the previous theories affirm that the moon is formed from the debris of the collision, some remains that were joining in orbit in a process that lasted months or years, the researchers who have presented the new theory have created a simulation that shows a different explanation.
According to them, the moon can be formed very quickly in just a matter of hours, which on a cosmic scale is something almost instantaneous; According to the researchers, the core of the moon was created shortly after the impact between theia and the earth.
The simulations used in the research shown in this animation released by NASA are some of the most detailed of their kind and run at the highest resolution of any previous run to study the origins of the moon and other giant impacts.
The computational power of the new work showed that lower-resolution simulations can miss important things in these kinds of collisions that previous studies simply couldn't see.
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