Small Bang Scientists seem to have figured out why the Moon is made up of such weird and heavy rocks: way back in the day, it turned itself inside out.
For decades now, scientists have pretty much agreed that the Moon formed from debris that flew off the young Earth when another planet smashed into it about 4.5 billion years. That cosmic wreckage “coalesced, cooled and solidified” to form the Moon as we know it today, researchers from the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory wrote in a press release — but what happened next is something of a “choose-your-own adventure,” as the scientists describe it.
In a new paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the LPL researchers found that the surprisingly high concentration of titanium found in Moon rocks, such as those brought back during the Apollo mission in the 1970s, could be the result of heavy minerals like ilmenite, which is rich in both titanium and iron, initially sinking to the core and then rising back up to the surface.
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