Any idea where the Moon came from?

Thought I would throw this one out there ... its bothered me for a while.

Moons orbiting other planets were formed from those planets' original "stuff". But our Moon?

I read somewhere that the Moon is at least as old as the Earth, but if it is older then ... that would be wierd. I suppose you could tell something from the age of moon rocks and relate that to the Earth's.

It seems a bit big to have come from Earth anyway. But then where did it come from if not from Earth?

 

during the forming of the solar system another planet body collided with the earth, the debri from the impact and parts of the impacting body were injected into space ....over time the material reformed into the moon we see today.

and moons are not formed from the planets they are orbiting masses that are caught by the planet's gravity field.

 

Well thats interesting ... any idea which planet body, and where the heck did that planet body go? Surely it couldn't have been Mars? Certainly not Jupiter or Saturn. Couldn't be Venus.

But you are saying that the Moon is a fusion of Earth original substance and some other body if I read that right.

 

...that doesn't make any sense; you said something hit earth, which sent up debris... then you said that moons are not formed by the planets they are orbiting around. ??

the leading theory on the moon's formation is that some billions of years ago a very large object impacted or glanced off the earth which kicked up all kinds of material from the surface layers, as well as sent the earth in a spin, and the space junk started orbiting the planet to form the moon.
there's a lot of other theories out there too though.. for instance, the moon might be made of cheese and/or cookie dough.

peace,
sophia

 

It was Tiamat.

The missing planet that probabilities and statistical analysis suggest should be where the asteroid belt is.
The computer simulation I saw showed exactly how a big impact would absorb into and then glob back out, like a lava lamp.
Then it became the moon, and is receding from us still.
The Bablylonians describe how Tiamat got destroyed.
Mars looks like the 3 massive hits it took were fatal. An entire hemisphere of its 3000 foot thick crust is missing, and there are bulges on the opposite side of Mars from the impacts.
I have no idea if Tiamat had anything to do with Mars, or the moon, just pondering.
There are many cataclysms that could have done it.

 

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The people who have already posted on this thread have got it right: the moon was formed from large chunks of the earth and another body when they collided over 4 billion years ago.

It is unknown what this other body was (speculation on "Tiamat" is just that...speculation), but it was obviously enormous. Much, much larger than the meteors that caused the mass extinctions ending the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. If such a collision were to happen today, it would almost certainly end all cellular life on the planet.

 

The Moon may also have been formed sperately from the Earth and simply wondered into the Earth's gravitational field. This seems more likely in my opinion, since it has been established that the minerals from which the Moon is constructed are quite different to those found upon the Earth.

 

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it was another planet, not one that we see now.

the theory say that the body that collided with the earth was smaller then the earth but larger then the current moon. which would mean as the two collide part of the colliding body would be absorbed into the earth the remaing material fractures and takes up orbit around the earth. then over time reforms into the current moon. there would be very little earth material on the moon but the impact would inject some earth material into orbit, but it is most the impacting body material.

our moon/earth system is unique.....the moon is too large for the earth to have grabbed with its gravitational field, in fact the moon was closer to the earth but over millions of years it is distancing itself...slipping away. one day the moon will journey off on its own path again.

as for were that impacting body came from .... i do not know...could have been a planet that formed between the earth and mars or even outside the solar system and drifted in.

 

That sounds like Sitchin's "Nibiru" theory, also known as the elusive Planet X that has the orbit of a comet and enters our solar system every 3600 years.

It's highly unlikely that the Earth and the Moon formed from the same matter, though, due to differences in their chemical make-up.

 

It made me very sad to hear that the moon may someday drift away from the earth. If humans are around then, they will surely find a way to strap it down and keep it from leaving. It would be a lonely planet without the moon.

 

not only that but ocean tides are a result of its gravitational pull....so that would change the planet

 

Well I find this slightly fascinating. If true then the Moon is NOT from the Earth and so it must have been captured by the Earth's gravitational field. But then, as somebody else pointed out, the Earth's gravitation is not strong enough for that.
This seems to be quite a mystery, and especially the fact that it is gravitationally locked so that one side only appears to Earth. Similar to Mercury, who only has one side to the Sun, another mystery I reckon.

Presumably someone has dated the moon rocks, 4 billion years or so. If they are as old as the Earth's then fine, but wouldn't another problem arise for another fully-formed body to be crashing into the Earth 4 billion years ago?

 

A few tidbits about Earth/Moon locking:

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980421b.html

http://www.science.edu.sg/ssc/detailed.jsp?artid=5899&type=6&root=6&parent=6&cat=63

Another about formation:

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question38.html

The nearly identical abundances of oxygen isotopes on the Moon and Earth is another important clue.

 

That theory is one of the wildest (and least plausible) I've heard.

Because it is. In the whole of astronomy, a few coincidences like that are to be expected.

Because if its orbit were any other shape, it would spiral away from the earth or crash into it.

There's no evidence that that's true, but even if it was, it could just be from the impact of an extrasolar comet.

Why not? Just because the moon is big doesn't imply "artificial world."

Any number of things that DON'T involve tabloid theories.

 

You know that is really fascinating ... and Kandahar you brush this off with " a few". Please!
Is it not extremely coincidential that the Moon is exactly the same "size" as the Sun in eclipses? What are the odds? A few thousand miles this way or that and it would not be so.

 

Shaggie,

Didn't someone say some of the Moon rocks are older than Earth? How could that be if this were true? Really there were no rocks at the time so what the heck is going on?

I ask a simple question like where did the Moon come from and it gets all complicated!

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The basic idea is this: about 4.45 billion years ago, a young planet Earth -- a mere 50 million years old at the time and not the solid object we know today-- experienced the largest impact event of its history. Another planetary body with roughly the mass of Mars had formed nearby with an orbit that placed it on a collision course with Earth. When young Earth and this rogue body collided, the energy involved was 100 million times larger than the much later event believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. The early giant collision destroyed the rogue body, likely vaporized the upper layers of Earth's mantle, and ejected large amounts of debris into Earth orbit. Our Moon formed from this debris.

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actually it has to do with its current orbit....billions of years ago it would have been closer to the earth and would have covered up the sun completely not the exact matched up you see today ...as time goes on the moon's orbit will keep expanding and there will be no eclipses at all.