moon so faithful that it accompanies the Earth all the time. However, there has yet to be a beginning for the story. Where did it come from and how long ago was it created?
Since the mid-1970s, astronomers have speculated that B.to rain formed as a result of a collision between Land and large protoplanets The ancient Mars called Theia, from the name Titan of Greek mythology, mother of Selene who is the goddess of the moon.
D.The impact of the collision created a huge debris field. The ruins of Theia, along with some of the vaporized rock and torn gas, slowly mixed into a disk to form a molten moon that merged and cooled.
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From there the Moon is expected to slowly form over thousands of years.
The first clue to the creation of the Moon was the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. At that time, NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin were carrying 21.6 kilograms of lunar rock and dust upon their return to Earth.
The samples are known to come from around 4.5 billion years ago. The clues provide estimates that the Moon was created over a period of approximately 150 million years after the formation of the solar system.
To demonstrate this, the scientists used a computer program called SPH With Inter-dependent Fine-Grained Tasking (SWIFT), designed to simulate complex and ever-changing gravitational networks.
The program was run on the COSMA supercomputer at the Distributed Research Utilizing Advanced Computing (DiRAC) facility, University of Durham, UK.
“What we have learned is that it is very difficult to predict how much resolution is needed to simulate a severe collision,” said Jacob Kegerreis, a computational cosmologist at Durham University. Live science.
COSMA also simulated hundreds of Earth-Theia collisions with different angles, rotations and speeds. The researchers were able to model the impact of the astronomical crack at a higher resolution than ever.
The resolution in this simulation is determined by the number of particles used in the simulation.
According to Kegerreis, a giant impact with standard simulation resolution is typically between 100,000 and 1 million particles. However, in this new study he and his research colleagues were able to model up to 100 million particles.
“Second, perhaps more importantly, using too low a resolution in your simulation can give you misleading or even wrong answers,” he said.
One of the higher resolution simulations revealed that the Moon formed within hours. It happened when the pieces of Earth that had been separated by the collision merged with the shattered pieces of Theia.
The results of this simulation offer a single-stage formation theory that provides clear answers to the visible properties of the moon, such as its wide and inclined orbit; the inside is partially liquid; and thin crust.
The scientists then published their findings on Oct.4 in the journal The letters of the astrophysical diary.
However, researchers will need to examine rock and dust samples excavated from the depths below the lunar surface after NASA’s upcoming Artemis mission.
“Even more samples from the lunar surface could be very useful in making new and safer discoveries about the composition and evolution of the moon, which we can then trace back to model simulations like ours,” said Kegerreis.
According to the researchers, the search for the moon could explain how the Earth formed and became a life-sustaining planet.
“The more we learn about how the Moon formed, the more we discover the evolution of our Earth,” said study co-author Vincent Eke, a physics professor at Durham University.
(can / arh)
