Martin Jutzi, and Erik Asphaug/nature
The artist shows the collision between the month and the month. Scientists say that reductions could be responsible for the month of asymmetric shape.
Martin Jutzi, and Erik Asphaug/the nature of this artist shows a collision between the month and the month. Scientists say that reductions could be responsible for the month of asymmetric shape.
On the early Earth had two moons instead of just one – our known Moon, as well as a smaller companion, the Moon, which also rose in the sky after tens of millions of years.
That’s according to a new theory, which says that this is less a month eventually went over to our Moon, and is still there, in the form on the other side of the mountain.
Scientists have long puzzled those mountains, and the fact that both our months are very different. In addition to the flat plains, while on the opposite side is high and mountainous.
Erik Asphaug, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California in Santa Cruz, he says, he was on about this asymmetry, when he had an idea. “I thought,” well, you know, just something to hit the Moon, and in such a way that neither is the crater, but it’s a big maybe? ” “he recalls.
Scientists believe that our Moon was created when the object of the giant size of Mars early Earth, sending out the disc from the orbit of our planet. It’s the ruins of the artisans to the Moon, says Asphaug, but a companion of the moon would have formed at the same time.
He and a colleague, Martin Jutzi, did computer simulation to find out what can happen when a small companion Moon slow collision with our moon.
Sister moon
Instead of creating a crater, produced by the collision of a mountainous pile of debris. “What you see when looking at the Moon far away, if our theory of truth, is, in fact, we see the planet, which collided with it,” says Asphaug.
“And so you have before this event is a few months in the sky: our Moon, which we know and love, and sister moon, which is no longer,” adds Asphaug. “You and fit every day as well as our Moon, but you have two of them. “
Nothing would not comply with the following two months in the sky, but, as all of these events occurred before the dawn of life, when the country was still basically fused with only a thin crust of beginnings.
Two scientists to publish their work in the journal Nature.
Maria Zuber, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that it is a compelling new theory of why the moon may be in the mountains, even if there are no volcanoes or colliding continents.
The Moon is littered with evidence of past conflicts, he says, but “all of these reductions tend to openings as opposed to the mountains. It took a relatively, simulation, a special set of conditions to the mountain, not a crater. “
“I think this idea has a lot of attention, because it is a very novel, it is very clever, and people will be interested in testing, whether it’s correct or not,” said Zuber.
The ideal test should go on the far side of the Moon and to collect a sample of the rocks, but none of the mission as planned, he says.
However, some evidence may come from the mission, which is scheduled to start next month, Zuber, the gravity recovery and Interior laboratory. The Twin spacecraft orbiting the Moon, and the mapping of the Lunar gravitational field to expose its internal structure.
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