The Moon Might Have Formed a Little Later Than Originally Believed

In line with the Giant Impact Hypothesis, the Moon shaped when a Mars-sized object (named Theia) collided with Earth billion years in the past, at a time when the Earth was nonetheless a ball of magma. This occasion not solely led to the Earth-Moon system we acknowledge at present, additionally it is beleived to have led to the differentiation of the Earth’s core area into an molten Outer Core and a stable Interior Core.

Nonetheless, there was an ongoing debate as to the timing of this impression and the way lengthy the following formation of the Moon occurred. In line with a new research by a staff of German researchers, the Moon shaped from a magma ocean that took as much as 200 million years to solidify. Because of this the Moon completed forming about 4.425 billion years in the past, or 100 million years later than beforehand thought.

The research, which not too long ago appeared within the journal Science Advances (titled “A long-lived magma ocean on a young Moon“), was carried out by planetary geophysicists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), together with researchers from the Technical University of Berlin and the Institute of Planetology on the College of Münster.