Result Moon It is slightly younger than scientists previously thought, about 85 million years younger, to be precise.
In a new study, researchers at the German Aerospace Center discovered that not only did the moon have massive and burning ocean of magma, but our rocky satellite also formed later than scientists previously expected.
Billions of years ago, a Mars-sized protoplanet smashed into young Earth, and a new rocky body formed from the rubble and cosmic debris – our moon. In this new work, the researchers reconstructed the timeline of the moon’s formation. While scientists had previously thought that this moon-forming collision occurred 4.51 billion years ago, the new work fixed the moon’s birth just 4.425 billion years ago.
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To determine this 85-million-year error in the moon’s age, the team used mathematical models to calculate the moon’s composition over time. Based on the idea that the moon harbored a massive ocean of magma, the researchers calculated how the minerals that formed as the magma solidified changed over time. By following the magma ocean timeline, scientists were able to trace their way back to the moon’s formation.
“By comparing the measured composition of the moon’s rocks to the predicted composition of the magma ocean in our model, we were able to trace the ocean’s evolution back to its starting point, the time the moon formed,” said author Sabrina. Schwinger, researcher at the German Aerospace Center, he said in a statement.
These findings, which show that the moon formed 4.425 million years ago (plus or minus 25 million years), are consistent with previous research that aligned the formation of the moon with the formation of Earth’s metallic core, according to the statement.
“This is the first time that the age of the moon can be directly linked to an event that occurred at the end of Earth formation, that is, the formation of the nucleus,” Thorsten Kleine, professor at the Institute of Planetology at the University from Münster in Germany, said in the same statement.
These findings were described in a new study published July 10 in the journal Science Advances.
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