RELICS of the Earth's long lost TWIN planet FOUND ON MOON Our Moon was born after a young Earth smashed its twin Theia, scientists writing in three studies just published by Nature have suggested. Their intriguing evidence reveals the Moon's origins may have been more incestuous than previously thought. Since the 1980s, scientists studying the Moon have largely agreed on the "giant …
Personally, I like Calvino's words:
"Didn't I realize it? Or had that been my intention from the very beginning? Before I could think properly, a cry was already bursting from my throat. 'I'll be the one to stay with you for a month!' Or rather, 'On you!' I shouted in my excitement: 'On you for a month!' and at that moment our embrace was broken by our fall to the Moon's surface, where we rolled away from each other among those cold scales."
- Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, "The Distance of the Moon"
Indeed, I've never heard a hypothesis that stated the body that collided with Earth to form the moon was from "far away". In fact the general assumption was that Theia formed very near to earth's orbit, hence the two bodies orbits being able to be perturbed enough to eventually collide.
I remember many years ago watching a BBC program (Horizon?) that pretty much said this much, including stating that moon rocks collected from the Apollo missions pretty much confirmed this. As such I assumed that "A sister planet collided with Earth to form moon" was the prevailing theory we had for a while now.
While more evidence is always great in science, I don't think this is as game changing as the article makes it out to be.
As far as planetary physics are concerned, I think we have passed the point where anything game-changing can occur.
Like you, I was living under the impression that the sister planet theory was pretty much the most valid theory for a while now. This paper is just another proof that that is the case.
Good to have, and good to know, but indeed, not anywhere near game-changing.
Not to mention the fact that we have the only surviving liquid core in the near Sol system. Venus, Mercury, and Mars all have dead cores. Hopefully the Mars rovers will gather something that indicates a theory that could indicate the truth.
Our surviving internal heat on Earth, suggests to me that a collision happened about 4 billion years ago, or so. I suspect it wasn't so much an impact as a joining of celestial bodies moving in almost the same orbit and speed. This would explain why water is still existent ( besides the Van Allen belt protections - which also rely on a magneto-sphere)
If the Moon was Earth's twin formed by accretion, you would expect the Moon to be made of pretty much the same stuff as Earth and in the same ratios.
That is not the case. The Moon's composition has different proportions of nickel, iron and other significant things, ergo it cannot be our twin.
The moon was formed as the result of a planet-shattering explosion at the site of the Extremely Large Hyperhadron Collider, a device invented, owned and operated by the Sh'takell M'gafli, a race descended from a common ancestor of Velociraptor some 3 trillion years ago, who venerated mathematics and science to the degree that even the meanest intellect could do complex number manipulation in their heads in a trice (a trick made easier by rote teaching of the -1 times tables in infant's school, a couple of numbers and an arithmetic operator we haven't rediscovered yet and the popular "Lets Do Some Hard Matrix Sums" prime-time holovision show).
The accident occurred when a drunken caveman wandered into the control room and twiddled a few knobs when no-one was paying attention.
The resulting explosion pulverised the supercontinent of Zha Gathor, ejecting much of it into space where it coalesced into what we today call "The Moon". Unfortunately the shockwave squished to paste every living being on the planet, melted most of what was left of the planet itself and set fire to the atmosphere, burning it into carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulate soot.
It was yonks before everything grew back again.
Now we're going to have to spend another $100 million on a big budget sci-fi movie to convince everyone Earth II is just a conspiracy theory...all those geniuses on the internet keep figuring out the US's greatest secrets!
First it was the Zeta Reticulans at Area 51, then it was the Nazi UFOs, now Earth II...
But if - as any fule kno - the moon landings were faked the moon rocks would have been brought back from earth.
From somewhere near Area 51 probably.
So the chemical constituents would HAVE to be somewhat identical.
PROOF! PROOF I TELL YOU! The landings WERE faked.
> I'm not sure it would be that spectacular in real-time though?
If the impactor was like Mars (6,779 km) and it struck close to Earth's escape velocity (11.2 km/s) then the impactor would travel into the target in 605 seconds, plus some extra for braking. Call it 15 minutes of fun viewing. The big splash would take longer, but perhaps not more than the typical movie run time.
However, one would need a really dark piece of smoked glass...
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