{"id":148797,"date":"2022-10-24T16:25:52","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T21:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/new-simulation-reveals-moon-formed-in-hours"},"modified":"2022-10-24T16:25:52","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T21:25:52","slug":"new-simulation-reveals-moon-formed-in-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/new-simulation-reveals-moon-formed-in-hours","title":{"rendered":"New simulation reveals Moon formed in hours"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/new-simulation-reveals-moon-formed-in-hours2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Billions of years ago, a version of planet Earth that looked very different than the one we live on today was hit by an object about the size of Mars, called Theia \u2013 and out of that collision the Moon was formed. How exactly that formation occurred is a scientific puzzle researchers have studied for decades, without a conclusive answer.<\/p>\n<p>Until now, most theories have claimed that the Moon formed out of the debris of this collision, coalescing in orbit over months or years. However, a new simulation presents a different outcome \u2013 the Moon may have formed immediately, in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis opens up a whole new range of possible starting places for the Moon\u2019s evolution,\u201d said Jacob Kegerreis, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center in California and lead author of a paper this month in <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/2041-8213\/ac8d96\" target=\"_blank\">The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/a>. \u201cWe went into this project not knowing exactly what the outcomes of these high-resolution simulations would be. So, on top of the big eye-opener that standard resolutions can give you misleading answers, it was extra exciting that the new results could include a tantalisingly Moon-like satellite in orbit.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Billions of years ago, a version of planet Earth that looked very different than the one we live on today was hit by an object about the size of Mars, called Theia \u2013 and out of that collision the Moon was formed. How exactly that formation occurred is a scientific puzzle researchers have studied for [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":566,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}