Our Moon May Have Formed From Multiple Small Ones, Says Report (go.com) 90
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: A series of cosmic collisions may have spawned multiple moonlets that morphed into the one big moon we know today. Rather than one giant impact that knocked off part of early Earth and created the moon, a number of smaller collisions may have produced lots of mini-moons, Israeli scientists reported Monday. And those mini-moons, over millions of years, may have clumped together to make one large one. The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job. They say that would explain why the moon seems to be composed of material from Earth, rather than some other planet, too. It's actually an old theory revitalized now by the Weizmann Institute of Science's Raluca Rufu in Rehovot, Israel, and his team. Their findings were published in Nature Geoscience.
An old theory, revitalized! (Score:1)
I should go find old theories and republish them as new ideas, then I can brag I was published in scientific journals.
Re:An old theory, revitalized! (Score:4, Insightful)
I should go find old theories and republish them as new ideas, then I can brag I was published in scientific journals.
"The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job."
this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
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Now they just have to show that the moon has different regions with matter different enough that it can be traced to different origins and disprove an iron core. Time for another moon mission!
Well, the iron core thing should be easy. First, I'm going to need enough grant money to build a REALLY BIG electromagnet. Going to need lots of power so maybe a dedicated reactor would be a good idea (can't think of a dam to co-opt). Lastly a very brave and possibly stupid person to throw the switch. Might want to make that momentary contact type switch. we don't want to slow anything down, or speed anything up, celestially speaking.
Man I am gonna be SO famous as long as the moon just wobbles a bit and doe
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First, I'm going to need enough grant money to build a REALLY BIG electromagnet.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
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I realize that in our ever changing economy a soul is not worth what it used to be*,
but even the current glut market has not devalued it to free...
*Oddly, the wages of sin have held steady for a very long time...
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"Grants aren't free when you have to lie to get them!"
"One way or other, what you get, you pay for." -- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Re:An old theory, revitalized! (Score:5, Insightful)
this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
No, this is what science has always been: chasing existing theories, testing them from different angles, trying to find weak points. Only a vanishingly small part of scientific discovery is about making a huge, new discovery. But what we see here, and what you are complaining about is really the poor journalism that tries to inflate good, but humdrum scientific results and make a sexy sounding headline out of it. And once again it has served its purpose: to attract clicks to slashdot's website, which translates into advertising revenue. From their point of view scientific accuracy only matters in as much as it increases revenue - they don't care if the clicks come from real scientists and engineers or clueless teenagers.
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this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
No, this is what science has always been: chasing existing theories, testing them from different angles, trying to find weak points ....
Well, unless that theory is AGW.
That's settled. The only thing in "science" ever to be "settled".</SARC>
And you got modded up, and this will get modded down - because HERETIC!, errr, DENIER!
Re:An old theory, revitalized! (Score:4, Funny)
No, he will get modded up because he's right and you will be ignored because you're spouting shite.
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Maybe you should verify the theory of gravity by stepping off from a great height?
Because it really is still being studied. Maybe you will find some ground-breaking data?
HTH.
--
BMO
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More likely some bone-breaking data...
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Maybe you should verify the theory of gravity by stepping off from a great height?
Because it really is still being studied. Maybe you will find some ground-breaking data?
HTH.
-- BMO
I see what you did there.....
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Well, unless that theory is AGW.
That's settled. The only thing in "science" ever to be "settled".
And you got modded up, and this will get modded down - because HERETIC!, errr, DENIER!
No, not really; no science is settled in the sense that it will never be scrutinised and probed again. AGW is only settled in the sense that although the scientists are constantly doing exactly what I said above, they don't find major weaknesses. To put it into context: anthropogenic climate change doesn't come out of thin air and a desire for funding; it is the result of work with models, and not just any old model. These climate models are based on the same physical theories that are used for a very wide
Re:An old theory, revitalized! (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is getting the AGW political activists out there to treat the problem in a scientific way, rather than another excuse to scream doomsday. "Deniers" are those of us who have seen these people be wrong about all their other apocalypses, and therefore find it easy to assume that they have to be wrong about this one too.
A surefire sign of the unthinking activist is their automatic rejection of any real-world solution to the carbon problem.
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While the worst that can be said about AGW is that it sped up the end of the ice age (which we are still in).
The world will not end.
Mankind will not go extinct.
The amount of sea level rise means that people have to move an inch a year to avoid it.
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The problem is getting the AGW political activists
OK, so you're critical of activists.
"Deniers" are those of us who have seen
Ah so because you don't like the activists, you're denying the science done by a completely different set of people. Yeah, that's a totally logical proposition.
Are you going to deny evoltion too because you found someone who was wrong about it?
Re:An old theory, revitalized! (Score:5, Insightful)
A surefire sign of the unthinking activist is their automatic rejection of any real-world solution to the carbon problem.
I don't think there is all that much difference between the doomsdayers on the one hand and the conspiracy theorist deniers on the other. Both sides have decided on their 'conclusion' a priori and mangle the available data to fit. The only real sceptics in all of this are the climate scientists; scepticism is at the very core of what science is. Blindly denying the observable facts - which both dommsdayers and deniers do - has nothing to do with being sceptical or thinking critically; it is nothing more than blind faith and represents the extreme of gullibility.
That said, it makes good sense to listen to the balanced, scientific viewpoints that are presented by climate science: humans do cause climate change, it is getting dangerous now, and we can actually do something constructive about it, not just in terms of short term mitigation, but also in terms of changing the stupid and wasteful habits that are a significant part of the reasons why we have climate change.
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it is getting dangerous now,
What makes you say that? What danger exactly does it pose?
You sound like an alarmist, rather than a science oriented person. AGW is speeding up the climate change that was already occuring. We are exiting an ice age still, unless we never actually get out of the ice age, all the effects of AGW are things that were already going to happen. The projected sea level rise is not something that will cause massive problems to avoid...unless we keep building on land that should be sea like New Orleans.
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And you got modded up, and this will get modded down - because HERETIC!, errr, DENIER!
Bollocks. There's far more of you intellectual cowards on slashdot than anyone who accepts the science.
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"The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job."
this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
Yeah, when is this Monte Carlo fad going to die anyway??? It's worse than bell bottoms.
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I should go find old theories and republish them as new ideas, then I can brag I was published in scientific journals.
"The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job."
this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
:) News flash: Upon conducting 3,000 more computer simulations, the models indicate that the moon could have been formed from quadrillions of smaller moons. Wait, more runs have shown that it could be in the septillion smaller moon range. Wait..."
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I should go find old theories and republish them as new ideas, then I can brag I was published in scientific journals.
Let's do Phlogiston theory! Just the name reeks of awesomeness.
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Bullshit may have occurred. (Score:1)
An old theory no more proven today than then.
That's no moon! (Score:1)
Someone had to say it.
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It's a bunch of small moons taped together!
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It's a bunch of small moons taped together!
You forgot the proper reference and trademark symbol after "Taped(tm)".
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I sense a joke I haven't heard since-
Many moons ago?
Basically, the mainstream theory, or not? (Score:5, Informative)
As I understand it, the Giant Impact Hypothesis has Theia's impact creating debris that gradually coalesced into the moon. That this debris formed several smaller moons before they joined up seems plausible, but I am not sure what is really different about what they are proposing.
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Its probably confusing to people who the word 'coalescing' and imagine the process to be gradual and organised when in reality it is very chaotic.
Will the asteriod belt someday coalesce and become something more significant??
The reason why we have an asteroid belt there instead of a planet is because of the gravitational tug between Jupiter and the Sun keeps those asteroids from coalescing.
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No, it's because some Vestian pissed off a Martian who grokked away a big chunk of its mantle, causing it to fly apart.
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Kind of like people who accidentally a whole word?
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Re:Basically, the mainstream theory, or not? (Score:5, Informative)
I read the article.
The main problem is that they claim "the problem" with the impact is that we can't find any evidence or residue from Theia. Well, a lot of the models show that the impacter's core (which would have already differentiated and have a metal core) mostly goes into the core of the earth, and the silicate portion mixes with the bulk silicate earth (BSE). The moon is mostly formed from the earth's mantel, not from the impactor, and this is why the moon has the same composition as the BSE. The problem is working out why there is little to no isotopic fractionation between the moon and the earth, since conventional wisdom suggests a hot violent process such as the giant impact would have resulted in such fractionation.
The most useful part of the article is the suggestion that we go to venus. The similarities and differences in isotopic fractionation between the moon and the earth can only really be interpreted with a greater understanding of isotopic variation among the terrestrial planets, and failed planets (e.g. Vesta) in the asteroid belt.
For more information I recommend reading this paper [sciencedirect.com] which is fortunately funded to be open access.
And HER team (Score:2)
Raluca Rufu in Rehovot, Israel, and his team.
As "Raluca" is a female name, it should be written "her team".
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https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
Looks like a female to me...
Occam's Razor (Score:2)
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You are right with but for the wrong reason according to the paper. Idea is that smalls collision was very frequent and "ordinary" at that early time. The collision with a rare and big bolid was "extraordinary". Occam's Razor choose lots of common and small collision.
That said, Its my turn to ask : If its so obvius as process then Venus which is the twin of Earth minus the Moon should have also form a noon also as a ordinary process. Proximity of Sun protect Venus?
The question should be if we accept this th
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Uranus is also thought to have had a large late impact - it's rotation axis is flipped at 98 degrees to the orbital axis, which is often described as "orbiting on it's side".
The Pluto-Charon system is also likely the result of a late large impact. Their size difference is even smaller
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Thanks for explaining your dumb, ignorant way of seeing science play out. Being stupid is like being dead, you don't know you're stupid, the rest of us have to put up with it.
Well, he was at least smart enough to post as an AC, sparing himself the well deserved ridicule.
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Except that Maritz's comment is unmodded, as you will planely see if you click on the word "Score". It is +2 because he has good karma and used that to contribute to the registered user's automatic 1.
Re:So many theories... so many on the payroll list (Score:4, Insightful)
What you are suffering from is called a displacement.
More precisely you appear to assume that scientists, like the creation myth in your favorite holy book, are claiming an absolute trust.
That does not work like that in the real world. Scientists create models and then try to invalidate them by comparing to reality.
Eventually all models become invalidated and are replaced by newer models that fit better with reality.
No sane scientist will ever claim that a specific model is absolutely true. That is why the article is full of "may" and "suggests". Same for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] page that describes the single large collision model.
The only thing that is correct in your post is that from the 5 scientists involved in your short story, the last one is probably the one that merits the most to be fired.
Why? Because scientists #1 and #3 are both proposing a model. Scientists #2 and #4 are defending those models. The only one that is not contributing in any useful way is scientist #5.
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You see, you were bullishly aggressive and dismissive with your initial assessment. You assumed the informational and detached format used to refute your reductive argument was designed as a personal attack, and therefor assumed it came from a defensive stance aka 'butt hurt'.
I guess what I'm really saying is that you are the one who is butt hurt.
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"What you are suffering from is called a displacement.
More precisely you appear to assume that scientists, like the creation myth in your favorite holy book, are claiming an absolute trust."
What you are suffering from (as are the people you are criticizing) is thinking that science and faith are the same type of thing (like a table, or a rock). When someone who thinks this way (like you apparently do) is on the "side" of science, those of faith become the targets of contempt ("creation myth in your favorit
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I could almost agree with you except that my critic was not against religion as a whole but against a literal interpretation of religious texts.
The issue is not science vs religion but reality vs blind faith in an absolute truth.
More generally, the same problem is found in non-religious contexts such as flat earth and other conspiracy theories where people will first assert a truth and then will ignore any evidence against it.
Moon of Minerva (Score:1)
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" Unless their simulations can explain Earth is the only planet to have gotten a full fledged moon in such an environment the single large impact theory would seem to be the more likely scenario."
It probably is. And surprisingly enough, the "single large impact" theory ALSO appears to be the same as the "multiple moonlets" theory, only "after the single large impact"
Am I wrong or reading this wrong? Wouldn't the "single large impact" toss up a ton of rocks and basically form a "ring around the Earth (mutl
Cheese? (Score:1)
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That was a grate joke!
Theorized in the Early 1960s (Score:2)
This was presented more than 50 years ago by Gordan J. F. MacDonald, at that time professor of geophysics at UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. His paper "Origin of the Moon: Dynamical Considerations" appeared in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences on 7 May 1965. As one of his computer programmers, I did the calculations for that paper. I think, however, that I might have done those calculations a few years earlier and that MacDonald published the same theory earlier than 1965.
At last! (Score:2)