The Formation of the Moon

The most recent theory of how the moon formed goes something like this: some few billion years ago a rogue planet about the size of mars collided with planet earth. The impact of this collision is hard to describe in any kind of known explosive category (science calculates that the impact was some 100 million times stronger than the recent asteroid that killed the dinosaurs; whatever that means). In any case the force of this collision between planets was enough to smash them into liquid rock. The bodies conjoin, the fast spin of the new earth’s rotation is jumpstarted even while a giant gob of terrestrial magma and liquified mantle splashes up into our sky and, failing to leave our gravity-well, finds its stable orbit, spinning and cooling into that heavy body that we now call the moon. While previous models assume that the moon later collected itself from a debris field after some thousands of years of revolution; this new model claims that the moon formed as it is now in a matter of hours.