New Research Suggests Moon Formed More Recently Than Assumed

A new article published in the journal “Science” is giving scientists new ideas about the process by which our moon was created billions of years ago.

It is a generally assumed that the moon was created in the aftermath of a huge asteroid collision with the earth. The collision created an enormous amount of debris, much of which was eventually caught by earth’s gravitational pull and coalesced into a solid body.

Although scientists feel pretty confident about that fact, there is relatively little known about that actual process that lead to the formation of the moon. Most astronomers attempt to use the fact that different chemicals cool at different rates in order to determine an approximate age of a body orbiting in space. However, this process is generally considered to be unreliable.

All of this changed when the scientist who wrote the article demonstrated an improved method of dating such objects. When the scientist used his new methodology to determine the age of the moon, he discovered that its age was approximately 4.4 billion years ago. Relative to prior knowledge about the formation of the moon, this new research suggests that the moon formed much more recently than traditionally assumed.