Researchers find birthplace of lost planet that created the Moon

Some of the world’s top scientists recently discovered that the Moon was an inside job.

While that sentence sounds like a mashup of your cousin’s two favorite conspiracy theories, it’s actually the conclusion of a peer-reviewed study published last month in Science.

When worlds collide

The study builds upon the theory that the Moon was created by a Mars-sized ancient planet named Theia slamming into the Earth some ~100 million years after the formation of our solar system (or ~4.5 billion years ago).

By looking at chemical clues in rocks from our planet, the Moon, and space (aka meteorites), scientists say they found remnants of Theia that show the ancient planet was built from the same construction materials as early Earth.

• Their findings suggest Theia was born in the inner solar system closer to the Sun than Earth, and eventually drifted outwards and collided with our planet.
• The Moon that resulted from this collision is mostly made up of material that originally belonged to Theia, according to computer models.

However…While Theia is considered the prime suspect for explaining the Moon’s origins, there are several other hypotheses popular with certain scientists.

They include capture theory, where the Moon was a wandering body that became captured in Earth’s orbit; the accretion hypothesis, where the Moon was first created alongside Earth; and fission theory, where Earth was moving so fast that some material broke away and became the Moon.