Moon Could Have Formed Right After a 'Cataclysmic' Impact; Supercomputer Simulation Shows Details of the Lunar Formation

A new hypothesis, as shown in the supercomputer simulations that made a higher resolution than before, suggests that the formation of the Moon might not have been a gradual and slow process after all although one that rather occurred within only a few hours.

As specified in a ScienceAlert report, the moon could have formed right after a "cataclysmic impact" that tore off an Earth chunk, then hurled it into space, as suggested in a new study.

Since the middle of the 1970s decade, astronomers have thought that the Moon could have been made through a collision between an ancient Mars-size protoplanet called Theia and Earth. The colossal impact would have formed giant debris from which the lunar companion gradually formed over thousands of years.

According to computational cosmologist Jacob Kegerreis from Durham University in England, they have learned that it is quite difficult to predict how much resolution is needed to stimulate such violent complex collisions dependably, one simply has to keep testing until he finds that increasing the resolution even further prevents making a difference to the answer he gets.

Moon Formation

In the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists got their initial clues about the creation of the Moon following the return of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from NASA brought 41.6 pounds of lunar rock and dust back to Earth.

The specimens, dated to approximately 4.5 billion years ago, placed the creation of the Moon in the turbulent period, approximately 150 million years after the solar system's formation.

Other hints point to the most gigantic natural satellite being created by a violent collision between a hypothetical planet and Earth, which scientists named after Theia, the mythic Greek titan, the mother of Selene, goddess of the Moon.

This evidence comprises similarities in the lunar composition, as well as the rocks of Earth, the spin of Earth, and the orbit of the Moon having similar orientations, the high combined angular momentum of a pair of bodies, and the debris disks' existence in the solar system.

'Cosmology Machine'

To examine different possible scenarios for the formation of the Moon after the collision, the new authors of the study turned to a computer program known as SPH with Inter-dependent Fine-grained Tasing or SWIFT, which is designed to simulate closely the complex and ever-changing web of hydrodynamic and gravitational forces, acting upon huge amounts of matter.

Doing so precisely is no simple computational task and thus, the scientists used a supercomputer to run the program. The system is called COSMA or "cosmology machine," at Durham University's Distributed Research Using Advanced Computing facility and DiRAC.

By using COSMA to simulate hundreds of Earth-Theia collisions with different spins, speeds, and angles, the lunar sleuths were able to model the astronomical crack-up's aftermath at higher resolutions than before.

According to Live Science, where this report originally came out, resolutions in these simulations are set by several particles the simulation is using. Kegerries said, for huge impacts, the standard simulation resolution is typically from 100,000 to one million particles, but in this new study, he and his fellow authors were able to model up to 100 million particles.

Related information about the formation of the Moon is shown on SpaceRip's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on Moon on Science Times.