Moon Formed In Interplanetary Hit-and-Run Incident, Say Astronomers
It turns out that our interplanetary companion has a similar composition to Earth, including an iron core. The consensus is that this rules out the possibility that the Moon formed elsewhere and was later captured by the Earth's gravity. Instead, it must have formed from the debris created by giant collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized body..... a model consisting of about 500,000 particles in which the Moon ends up being made of some 10,000 particles ..... the conditions on Earth at the time of the impact, about 4.5 billion years ago .... the more energetic impact would have heated the Earth's mantle to temperatures of about 10,000 Kelvin and heated the debris that formed the Moon to higher temperatures too
