Scientists believe the formation of the Moon has been something of a puzzle, according to a report from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
One leading theory proposes a cataclysmic impact involving a Mars-sized object and a young Earth. But a new study at Weizmann, based on hundreds of simulations run on a computer cluster, suggests instead a number of run-ins with smaller objects.
This would have produced smaller moonlets that would have eventually coalesced into the single Moon we have today. The research appeared in the January 10, 2017 edition of Nature Geoscience.
Research student Raluca Rufu and Prof. Oded Aharonson of the Weizmann Institute’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, together with Dr. Hagai Perets of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, asked whether a number of smaller collisions might better explain what happened several billion years ago, when the solar system was taking shape.
To test this scenario, the group ran around 800 impact simulations on the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Chemfarm cluster, which has more than 5,000 processor cores.
“The new scenario does not require finely tuned initial conditions,” says Rufu, “and if the smaller moonlets, as we think, were drawn into the same orbit, they could have merged over millions of years.”
“We are now running further simulations to try to understand how the smaller moonlets produced in these simulations might have coalesced to form our Moon,” adds Aharonson.