Using new supercomputer simulations, scientists at the Institute of Computational Cosmology at Durham University in the UK have shown that there is an alternative explanation for the origin of the moon, that is, a giant impact that sent a moon-like celestial body into Earth orbit soon after.
The researchers used SWIFT open source code to simulate hundreds of collisions, including changing the angle and velocity of the collision, as well as the mass and moment of inertia of the two colliding objects, and simulated the collision results at a higher resolution than ever before, explaining the state of the Earth-Moon system.
The resolution of the simulation is determined by the number of particles. Standard simulations of giant impacts typically have a resolution of 100,000 to 1 million particles, but studies can simulate up to 100 million particles, says computational cosmologist Jacob Kegerreis. With higher resolution, more details can be studied, just as larger telescopes take higher-resolution images of more distant planets or galaxies and discover new details. Second and more importantly, simulations that use too low a resolution can lead to misleading, or even wrong, answers.
Higher-resolution simulations show that the Moon formed from Earth-ejected material and Theia debris within hours of impact, providing a single-stage formation theory that provides concise and elegant answers to lunar visible properties, such as wide and inclined orbits , Partially molten internal structure and thin outer shell.
However, researchers must examine rock and dust samples dug up from the depths of the moon, and a future NASA Artemis mission will be able to determine the degree of mixing of the lunar mantle and help researchers rule out more possibilities for a better understanding of How planets form. The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL).
(This article is reproduced with permission from the Taipei Planetarium; source of the first image: Durham University)
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