The Earth May Have Had 2 Moons!!!

Hello everyone!

So, firstly, I'd like to share the Nature News Blog with you all. It has little blurbs about cool things that are happening in the world of science and is definitely a neat resource to check out.

On that blog, I found this article about discrepancies in dating of various samples of the Moon's crust.

More interestingly, that article finally lead me to the article I presented about the new proposed theory about our Moon. The article explains the model in which the early Earth may have had 2 moons initially. Our Moon formed when a Mars-sized object collided with the Earth. However, this model suggests that another small body was in a gravitationally stable point in the Earth-Moon system. This body was approximately 1/30th of the Moon's mass. Since the 2 bodies were in the same orbit, they ended up merging (into what is now our lone Moon) in a slow motion collision (which took several hours to complete). The other small body basically collided and splat onto our Moon, spreading out like a pancake. This model would account for the differing terrains on the side of the moon that we see and on the farside.

I'm not sure of all the detailed Physics that were employed in arriving at this model, but hopefully we'll all learn at least a bit of them in class!!

The picture included in this post is from the article.