(ORDO NEWS) — The bottom of deep lunar craters exposes rocks with a high content of heavy metals, which does not correspond to the current views on the origin of the satellite.
According to the most authoritative model today , the Moon was formed as a result of the collision of a young Earth with a celestial body, Teia, about the size of about Mars. The blow lifted huge masses of material from the crust and upper mantle into the air, some of them were in orbit and eventually formed a satellite. However, a new work, the results of which are presented in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, makes you think that the version needs to be clarified.
Essam Heggy and his colleagues working with the NASA LRO probe examined the composition of dust at the bottom of lunar craters, finding that they contained far more metal oxides (mainly iron and titanium) than in the upper layers of the Earth. Moreover, scientists noticed that the larger and deeper the crater, the greater the presence of metals: in their opinion, this may indicate that even deeper the iron becomes.
As a result, in general, the difference between the Earth’s lithosphere and the upper mantle and the Moon can be much more noticeable than previously thought. This makes us think about where the satellite could get additional amounts of iron from. Perhaps the collision that created it was much more catastrophic than we thought, and the destruction reached the inner, richer iron bowels of the planet.
In addition, the impact could have occurred earlier in the history of the Earth, when it had not cooled sufficiently yet and the upper molten layers contained more metals. Finally, do not discard alternative hypotheses about the origin of the moon: for example, from the gas-dust “donut” into which the ancient collision turned the Earth. In the end, the remains of the hypothetical Tei can still be preserved in the bowels of the satellite – they are quite capable of adding heavy iron to the moon.
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