It turns out the moon is a little younger than scientists previously thought — about 85 million years younger, to be precise. In a new study, researchers at the German Aerospace Center found out that, not only did the moon once have a massive, fiery magma ocean, but our rocky satellite also formed later than scientists previously expected.
Billions of years ago, a Mars-size protoplanet smashed into the young Earth and, amid the debris and cosmic rubble, a new rocky body formed — our moon. In this new work, the researchers reconstructed the timeline of the moon’s formation. While scientists have previously thought that this moon-forming collision happened 4.51 billion years ago, the new work pegged the moon’s birth at only 4.425 billion years ago.
“By comparing the measured composition of the moon’s rocks with the predicted composition of the magma ocean from our model, we were able to trace the evolution of the ocean back to its starting point, the time at which the moon was formed,” study co-author Sabrina Schwinger, a researcher at the German Aerospace Center, said in a statement.
These findings, which show that the moon formed 4.425 billion years ago (give or take 25 million years), agree with previous research that aligned the moon’s formation with the formation of Earth’s metallic core, according to the statement.
“This is the first time that the age of the moon can be directly linked to an event that occurred at the very end of the Earth’s formation, namely the formation of the core,” Thorsten Kleine, a professor at the Institute of Planetology at the University of Münster in Germany, said in the same statement.
These findings were described in a new study published on July 10 in the journal Science Advances.
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Andy Rowlands
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Interesting article, but 85 million years in a history of 4.5 billion is really neither here nor there 🙂
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geran
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This is exactly how pseudoscience starts. There is not one verifiable piece of evidence here. It is all assumption, guesswork, and estimation–aka “garbage”.
Then the garbage is fed to a computer to make it appear science-y.
More funding will be needed.
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Joseph Olson
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“New Evidence that all Stars are Born in Pairs” at > Phys(.)org > June 14, 2017
More believable that the Sun’s dwarf pair dropped the Moon off during it’s long elliptical orbit, before crashing into the Sun, flying off into space, or hiding as a brown dwarf Planet X. Mathematically models are, after all, MODELS.
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John Doran
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Genius journalist Jim Marrs, RIP, makes a rather different case, compellingly so.
In his 2013 book, Our Occulted History Do The Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?
Marrs draws evidence from sources such as Sumerian clay tablets, our oldest known form of records, through the Bible, to modern NASA scientists.
He makes a rather good case that the Moon is a spacecraft, a hollowed-out planetoid.
The lava marias were formed by huge machines known as mascons, mass concentrations, detected first when they affected the orbits of satellites.
Examination of 842 pounds of rocks & soil collected between 1969 & 1972 revealed the rocks date back to 5.3 billion years old, while the dust dates back a billion years older.
November, 1969, saw the Moon reverberate for an hour from the impact of the lunar module ascent stage: a rather definite pointer to a hollow Moon.
In July 1970, Russian scientists Michael Vasin & Alexander Shcherbakov published an article in thee Soviet journal Sputnik entitled “Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence?”
Marrs makes the case that Mankind is the product of Alien manipulation: mixing their DNA with that of hominids already existing on Earth.
Well researched, referenced & indexed, it’s a fascinating read.
His 1999 book, Alien Agenda is of similar quality.
JD.
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