The Moon's Origin - What's your Theory?

[8kids]

I like the idea of the earths rotation being so fast it threw off enough mass to create the moon......or have I just made that up.

[Matt Scunthorpe]

The young Earth would of had to of been spinning amazingly fast for a chunk to be able to fly off and go into a stable orbit.

I always thought that it was a glancing blow, so the impactor would of carried on after the impact in whatever condition it managed to survive in. In terms of the elements that are on the Earth compared to the Moon, how do we know that all the elements were part of the infancy, the colliding object could of given the Earth a new element that it didnt have before.

In school we were always taught that everything in the Universe is made of the same stuff, but surely not everything has the same amounts of it. Image you have some paving slabs, 5 slabs by 5, and you dropped a water baloon in the very centre, the slabs closest to the middle will be wetter than the ones on the very edge. If you imagine that those slabs are planets forming for example, not all the planets would have the same elements, and some maybe not at all.

That's how i always imagine it.

[JulianO]

Yes - it would have to spin about once an hour to even start throwing things off. The moon was formed more from the glancing blow and the splatter.

[Cath]

So what's your theory, if you have one?

How can any of us have 'our own theory' ? .. where would we get our data from to form a theory about how the Moon came about?

[Duanebryars]

The mars sized planet colliding with the earth is certainly the prevalent theory amongst scientists. I believe I read that if it weren't for Saturn's immense gravitational pull that we would similarly witness Saturn's rings coming together to form moons in much the same way they have theorised that the ring of debris around earth formed our moon.