• tomiant@piefed.socialEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    This is legitimately one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

    What happened to the thing that crashed into us, just absorbed into the plasma Earth? Just the forces involved absolutely boggles the mind. Do we know what the thing was made of? Can we still detect it, did it bring with it a bunch of weird shit that wasn’t on Earth before, like I don’t know, whatever elements?

    Does the moon retain some of the chemical-physical composition of the object? Because I am under the impression that the Moon is a chunk of Earth that got “shot off” by this thing, but should have traces left from the intermingling of stuff in the impact.

    Must have been like a little proto planet that just so happened to walk into the wrong neighborhood. Or vice versa.

    • Abigail (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      Here’s the wikipedia page for the theory, which makes for a pretty cool read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis

      Some cool stuff:

      • The other body was a mars-sized protoplanet called Theia.
      • According to computer simulations, remnants of Theia could be still visible inside the Earth as two giant anomalies of the Earth’s mantle.
      • By examining isotope ratios in lunar samples from the Apollo missions, we can see the moon and earth likely had a common origin.