Journal
NATURE
Volume 412, Issue 6848, Pages 708-712Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/35089010
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The Moon is generally believed to have formed from debris ejected by a large off-centre collision with the early Earth(1,2). The impact orientation and size are constrained by the angular momentum contained in both the Earth's spin and the Moon's orbit, a quantity that has been nearly conserved over the past 4.5 billion years. Simulations of potential moon-forming impacts now achieve resolutions sufficient to study the production of bound debris. However, identifying impacts capable of yielding the Earth-Moon system has proved difficult(3-6). Previous works(4,5) found that forming the Moon with an appropriate impact angular momentum required the impact to occur when the Earth was only about half formed, a more restrictive and problematic model than that originally envisaged. Here we report a class of impacts that yield an iron-poor Moon, as well as the current masses and angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system. This class of impacts involves a smaller-and thus more likely-object than previously considered viable, and suggests that the Moon formed near the very end of Earth's accumulation.
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