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Uncategorized Wednesday, October 17th 2012 at 1:54 pm

Best Proof Yet That Moon Was Created By Smaller Planet Colliding With Earth

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Earth’s unusually large, close moon is pretty key to life on the planet, governing the regular tide cycles that may have been necessary to set the stage for the first life in the planet’s oceans, but its origin has been the subject of a number of competing theories. The leading explanation also happens to be the most awesome one — that a planetoid about the size of Mars smashed into the Earth some four and a half billion years ago, dashing off a chunk of the still developing planet that hung around as the natural satellite we know and love. That theory moved a long way toward validation today with the finding that Moon rocks show chemical signatures consistent with being exposed to an explosion that was literally Earth-shattering.

The best evidence for the so-called Giant Impact Theory is that Moon rocks are very similar to Earth rocks in their makeup, with one major exception — they’re very low on volatile elements that react readily or evaporate easily. That discovery, made decades ago, suggests Moon rocks were Earth rocks at one point, but were subjected to an enormous explosion sometime in their existence, eliminating all but the most stable elements in them. That’s very consistent with the theory of a cosmic-grade fender bender chipping off a chunk of the Earth, but not knocking it out of orbit.

There’s just one problem. If a collision of that magnitude rocked the Earth, researchers would also expect to find evidence of a geologic process known as isotopic fractionation. For those of you who may not be astrogeologists, isotopic fractionation is a sort of elemental sorting process. After a rock is melted, lighter isotopes (strains of an element with fewer neutrons) of it will evaporate off, leaving behind heavier isotopes (with more neutrons). Since there’s been no evidence of that process, the Giant Impact Theory has been left up in the air for decades as probable, but not provable. Until now.

A team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis analyzed  moon rocks gathered during the Apollo missions, finding higher than expected concentrations of a heavier form of zinc. While most of the volatile zinc would have been burned away in the impact that created the Moon, what remained behind would be the heavier zinc isotopes, which researchers found in all 20 of the Moon rocks they looked at during their research.

If it all checks out — and the study, which will be published tomorrow in the journal Nature looks pretty darn thorough — it will provide proof that the Moon was born from an explosion and impact that boggles the mind. That in turn suggests that life on Earth may not have been possible without a very nearly cataclysmic event, which we’re willing to say is pretty damn cool.

(via PhysOrg, image courtesy of NASA/JPL)

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  • AM

    Anyone here ever read The Twelfth Planet, by Zecharia Sitchin ?

  • http://www.facebook.com/privatewojtek Bear Philippe

    Nope. I tend to prefer non-fiction to the rantings of a lunatic.

  • http://www.facebook.com/privatewojtek Bear Philippe

    Giant Impact Theory is a boring name. The Theia Event is much more punchy!

  • Crazy

    Would it then be fair to question if the beginnings of life on earth were possibly alien remnants left behind after the collition and thus say that this could potentially uncover that there is or at least was life existing elsewhere in the universe?… Assuming of course that the study of such topics will be addressed and confirmed in sequential order… But as I asked: Fair to question? Right?
    I remember having a debate with a science teacher at my catholic highschool regarding the age of our moon and the fears of certain religious communities leading up to the moon landing.

  • Jadis

    there are ‘ranting lunatic’s of the past that have predicted non-fiction realities of the future. Expl. airplanes.

  • http://twitter.com/Vlad33141 Vlad

    This people is crazy, the idea of making the earth out of an explosion or the moon is just nuts, I will believe that the day that you go to the supermarket buy the ingredients for you dinner and then blow them up to have dinner ready, if your plate comes out fine, with just the right salt, pepper , onions cut and meat cooked to perfection, then and only then I will believe all this non-sense.

    I know that some people will say that those are 2 different things, but if something like cooking takes some preparation and could not be done just by exploding some ingredients together, how can you believe that the earth was done by a collision with another meteor or planet? If earth was only a couple of inches away of the sun, we will die it will be too cold, but if it was closer by some inches , we will also die burned by it. The water cycle. The animals, and mostly us, we can taste food, see in color, we feel pain, etc, etc, etc.

    All the explosions bring destructions if not take a look at history.

  • Idlethoughts

    That does not however validate all “lunatics” many of whom are in fact crazy or wrong.

  • Jadis

    writing science fiction does not make the author crazy or wrong. They’re being creative. Sometimes something they’ve thought of happens in the future. Most things that people think up are wrong. That doesn’t mean that some of them aren’t possible.

  • Idlethoughts

    Oh, were his righting written as fiction? If so sorry, I just did a search and briefly skimmed a few things about his work. This serves as a good reminder to me as to why i normally try to read more in-depth on things I find interest in.

  • Idlethoughts

    So many misconceptions so little time… I’ll get back to this an do a full dissection later, I promise

  • Mike H

    This isn’t the only explanation, you know. It’s far more simple and parsimonious to explain the isotopic content as leftover from a burning star. As a matter of fact, the earth and moon were confirmed to be isotopic twins. This is just more evidence that they are the long cooled remnants of a binary star system. The Earth and Moon are twin black dwarf stars, or stars that have cooled enough to expose their iron cores.

    Also, how do you expect gravity to create forces strong enough to melt iron?

  • Idlethoughts

    Okay to put this simply you seem to have vastly misunderstood what the theory was. Here’s the basic idea: Several billion years ago the earth only a couple hundred million years old and was still a cooling chunk of semi-molten rock formed from left over matter orbiting our sun. It was then hit by a roughly mars-sized chunk of rock most likely from elsewhere in the solar system. The collision cause a large portion of the earth to shatter off of it and eventually fall into a stable orbit around it. After a several million years or so these molten planetoids have cooled and rounded due to there gravity forming the earth and moon respectively. Around 3 billion years ago the first life appears in the earths, converts our atmosphere, eventually becomes multicellular, and through evolution becomes all the life we see around us.

    Also the earth is nowhere near thats sensitive to sun distance the, fact that we have a elliptical orbit clearly shows that. And even without that you should have figured it out by the fact that your hand doesn’t burn or freeze when you move it a couple inches or a couple miles.

    Hope this clears things up for you.

  • Jadis

    I was not speaking of a particular author aside from the one who foretold the airplane. I was speaking in general terms of fiction writings, some of which are quite in depth. I could use Lord of the Rings as an example for the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien created a spoken and written language. That being only part of the reason. We could talk about Slaughter House 5 or any number of other fiction works that have plenty of depth.

  • Idlethoughts

    The composition is all wrong for them being black dwarfs.

  • http://www.facebook.com/privatewojtek Bear Philippe

    Oh, man. This is like 8 kinds of kooky.