© NASA/JPL-Caltech Artist's depiction of a collision between two planetary bodies. Such an impact between the Earth and a Mars-sized object likely formed the Moon.
Planetary scientist Frédéric Moynier of Washington University in St. Louis reports that he has found evidence which backs up the Giant Impact Theory, which was first proposed at a conference in 1975.
The Giant Impact Theory says that Earth's moon was created in an apocalyptic collision between a planetary body called Theia and the early Earth.
According to the theory, the planet smashed up against Earth, releasing so much energy that it melted and vaporized Theia and much of the proto-Earth's mantle.
The Moon then condensed out of the cloud of rock vapor, some of which also re-accreted to the Earth, according to the Giant Impact Theory.
Moon rocks brought back to Earth show that they are very poor in sodium, potassium, zinc and lead, Moynier said.
"But if the rocks were depleted in volatiles because they had been vaporized during a giant impact, we should also have seen isotopic fractionation," Moynier said. Isotopes are variants of an element that have slightly different masses.
Moynier said that when a rock is melted and then evaporated, the light isotopes enter the vapor phase after than the heavy isotopes, leaving a vapor enriched in the light isotopes and a solid residue enriched in the heavier isotopes.
"If you lose the vapor, the residue will be enriched in the heavy isotopes compared to the starting material," explained Moynier.
The scientists who originally analyzed the first moon rocks were unable to find isotopic fractionation, but this didn't stop Moynier from believing the Giant Impact Theory to be true.
"When you find something that is new and that has important ramifications, you want to be sure you haven't gotten anything wrong," he said. "I half expected results like those previously obtained for moderately volatile elements, so when we got something so different, we reproduced everything from scratch to make sure there were no mistakes because some of the procedures in the lab could conceivably fractionate the isotopes."
The team analyzed 20 samples of lunar rocks, including ones brought back from the Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 15, and Apollo 17 missions. They also analyzed 10 Martian meteorites for comparison.
They found that the lunar rocks have much lower concentrations of zinc, but are enriched in the heavy isotopes of zinc. Earth and Mars have isotopic compositions like those of chondritic meteorites, which are thought to represent the original composition of the cloud of gas that helped form the solar system.
The isotopic homogeneity of the lunar materials suggests that isotopic fractionation resulted from a large-scale process rather than one that operated just locally.
The team said the most likely large-scale event is wholesale melting during the formation of the Moon. The zinc isotopic data supports the theory that a giant impact gave rise to the Earth-Moon system.
"The work also has implications for the origin of the Earth," Moynier says, "because the origin of the Moon was a big part of the origin of the Earth."
Without the moon, planetary scientists believe the Earth would spin more rapidly, making days shorter, weather more violet, and climate more chaotic, which they believe would have also resulted in humans not coming to existence.
The research will be published in the journal Nature on Thursday.
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We are being lied to on a monumental scale.