Just a boy
According to a new sophisticated model, the Moon is much younger than scientists previously thought, with a tune of about 85 million years.
It is not such a drastic change when you consider how long the Moon has been. The research, published Friday in the magazine. Scientific advances, adjusts the Moon’s age from 4.51 billion years to 4.425 billion, with error bars of 25 million years on each side. But it does clear up some of the mysteries surrounding how it was formed in the first place.
Magma ocean
The prevailing theory is that a rock the size of Mars crashed into Earth and the debris eventually consolidated to form the Moon. The still-forming Earth may have been covered in an ocean of magma, and this new research postulates that the Moon also had an ocean of magma more than 1,000 kilometers deep.
However, the main disagreement is over how long it took for that ocean to cool down: existing models said the Moon solidified after 35 million years.
“The model results show that the moon’s ocean of magma lasted a long time and took almost 200 million years to fully solidify in the rock mantle,” lead author Maxime Maurice, a planetary geophysicist, said in a press release. from the German Aerospace Center.
Minor setting
By modeling how the composition of the lunar rocks formed by that ocean changed over time, the team was able to reach their new era for the Moon.
The new timeline is also seamlessly related to Earth’s history, meaning that the Moon formed around the same time as Earth’s core.
READ MORE: Researchers find earlier age for Earth’s moon [German Aerospace Center]
More on the moon: New theory: the moon formed from magma detached from the earth
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