&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Earth-Theia collision created the moon in just 5 hours, study shows")
The Moon was formed when a planet named Theia smashed into Earth 4.5 billion years ago, releasing huge amounts of rocks and debris into outer space. This material coalesced and clumped together over years to create our lunar satellite. However, scientists from the Southwest Research Institute and the University of Arizona have now claimed that it could have taken just five hours for the Moon to have formed.
They created several computer simulations of the event, and some of them showed that an intact moon didn't take very long to take shape. They attributed the time taken to shape the Moon to how hot Earth and Theia were before the collision. Dr Adeene Denton said that these temperatures decided how fast the massive disk of debris collected to make the moon.
Dr Adeene Denton said that when he “used the same parameters as original impact modelling, down to the equal temperature structures inside both bodies, within around five hours, an intact moon emerged.”
Material strength of Earth and Theia changed the equation
The latest model, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, went around understanding how the Moon formed differently. Previous studies treated the Moon and Theia as fluid worlds and did not take the strength of their rocks into account. When the strength of these planetary materials was also considered in the simulations, the results were very different.
Dr Denton said that material strength is important while studying collisions between smaller bodies like asteroids, "or for my previous paper about the formation of the Pluto–Charon system." He added that when applied to the moon, both criteria turned out to matter a lot in the case of the moon as well.
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Scientists say the findings can help learn exactly when this historic collision that created the moon occurred. It would also explain the reason behind the differences in its composition and the amount of volatile material in the lunar body.
The Moon and Earth are compositionally quite similar, which scientists think is because they were formed from a common region of the protoplanetary disk. Dr Denton added that Mars and Earth are very different, which means they were both formed from different regions and further apart.
