Added 1 new A* page:A* reader Latrans, whose nifty A* art inverts you may recall, hit upon one of a recent page that came out particularly niftily:
~~~~~
A chunk has been knocked out of the silly yet persistent notion that the Moon was created by debris from a primordial collision between the Earth and a made-up Mars-sized planet; the story goes that the core of that planet sank into the Earth's, but the light stuff was blown off and gathered in orbit to form the Moon.
Sound kind of dumb? I think it does, and I don't know why real scientists would spend their time trying to disprove such a ludicrous idea, but some of them have, comparing the isotopic ratios of titanium found in Moon and Earth material; these ratios tend to vary quite a bit among asteroids and other bodies that formed in different areas of the solar system, so the thinking is that if the shell of another planet blew off after hitting Earth and formed the Moon, then the Moon should have a different isotopic signature than the Earth. (It occurs to me that if parts of that made-up planet went into both Moon and Earth, then maybe they would even out, but what do I know--anyway I don't believe any such thing could have happened. :P)
Their finding? The isotopic signatures of the Moon and Earth are pretty much identical. So this rules out some of the relatively more straightforward Earth + mystery planet = Moon ideas. Still, according to that linked article, proponents of the idea have already switched tactics and proposed other outlandish explanations to support their mystery planet.
Why are some people so dedicated to believing in another planet knocking the Moon out of Earth on extremely scanty "evidence"? You got me. Obviously, a vast conspiracy is afoot! =P
|
