Last year Simon Lock and Sarah Stewart , from Harvard University and the University of California , Davis respectively , nominate a bizarre newfangled type of planetary body . Now they ’re back , with a routine of colleagues , to evoke that this body may have formed the Moon .
In a paper published in theJournal of Geophysical Research , the team indicate the Moon may have formed inside our planet when it was a spinning superheated disc of vaporized rock , prognosticate asynestia .
Our current best theory for how the Moon formed is that , about 4.5 billion years ago , our planet was hit by a Mars - sized target prognosticate Theia . This is theGiant Impact Hypothesis , with the resultant debris from the impact eventually come together to create the Moon .
One problem , though , is that this theory ca n’t in good order account for the composition of the Moon . So what if there was another way ?
“ In our new mannikin , a more energetic impact vaporizes a substantial fraction of Earth and transforms Earth into a synestia , ” Lock told IFLScience . “ As the synestia cool off , it shrinks inside the lunar orbit and the Moon emerges from the synestia . ”
A synestia is basically a magnanimous donut of super - heated material , shape when two planet - sized object collide . temperature inside a synestia give up to 4,000 Kelvin , with pressure in the tens of standard atmosphere . They in all likelihood shrink rapidly though as they radiate hotness , lasting only hundreds of years – a comparatively lilliputian sentence in galactic terms – before collapsing into a molten major planet .
Inside the Earth synestia , chunks of liquified stone would have been thrown into compass by the impact , providing giant “ seminal fluid ” for the Moon . Vaporized rock would have rained onto the proto - Moon as the synestia cringe , finally leave two large bodies – Earth and the Moon .
The gamey temperature that the Moon mould under would entail it fall back some of its more easily vaporized element , which could excuse its slenderly different authorship .
One of the benefits of this theory for excuse the Moon ’s formation is that there are multiple ways to form a synestia . You do n’t need an exact impactor sizing at a specific clock time , just a swelled enough impingement to create this swirling mass of molten rock .
We ’ve never seen a synestia so they ’re very much only theoretical at the consequence . But Lock said that by improving estimates of the Moon ’s opus , it could be possible to function out the conditions in which the Moon formed , and see if they ’re consistent with the idea .
“ People have theorise exchangeable structure could be formed by rapidly rotate superstar and gaseous state giants but nothing has been directly discover , ” said Lock . “ I hope that we might be capable to find synestias in future exoplanet surveys . ”
