Hey guys
Do you know how our dear moon was formed ??? If not, then welcome to my blog.
Well , there is no concrete proof of how the moon was actually formed but we have 4 major theories related to it. So let's talk about them.
Acc. to this theory , moon was formed somewhere else in the solar system and was just wandering around (like an asteroid) but then got captured by earth's gravity as it was passing from nearby , and since then, it is stuck in earth's gravity.
This theory would explain the differences in composition of earth and moon . However, such orbiters are often oddly shaped, not as spherical as moon. This theory explained some element of existence of moon , but leave many questions unanswered. While this thoery fall out of favor in 1980s , it was recently suggested that earth could have got its moon from venus(as venus has no moon).
This theory suggest that moon was created along with earth at its formation. But the doubt is that if both moon and earth were created st same time , then most probably they should have same composition , although they share much of the same material , moon is much less dense than earth , which would likely not to be the case if both started with same heavy elements at their core.
Acc. To the fission scenario, earth had been spinning so fast that some material of it broke away and the pieces combined and began to orbit around the planet , known as the moon .
But this theory was soon rejected.
What is most widely accepted today is -
Lemme explain it in simple words . So according to this theory , before earth and the moon , there were proto earth and theia( a roughly mars sized planet) . At some point in earth's very early history, these two bodies collided.
During this massive collision , nearly all of earth and theia melted and reformed as one body , with a small part of the new mass spinning off to become the moon as we know it .
This sort of formation would explain why the moon is made up of lighter elements ,making it less dense than earth.
Acc. to APOLLO MISSIONS , this theory is the one they answers most of the questions ,but there are still many unanswered questions , so until a new theory come up that explains things better, this is the most relevant theory we have.
Acc. To NASA, when the proto earth and that theia collided, the energy involved was 100 million times larger than the big event that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.
So that's it for today.
Hope u learned something new.
