"During the early solar system's game of cosmic billiards, Earth was struck by a neighbor,” said Dauphas. “It was a lucky shot. Without the moon's steadying influence on our planet's tilt, the climate ...

The formation of the Moon may have come harder on the heels of Earth's birth than we thought. According to a new analysis by researchers from the US, France, and Germany, Earth's constant companion ...

Scientists have long believed that the Moon was formed by a massive object crashing into the Earth. But what was that thing ...

A groundbreaking study in Nature has shaken up our understanding of the moon’s formation. This research suggests that the moon was born during Earth’s earliest days, revolutionizing the timeline of ...

Billions of years ago, so the theory goes, something around the size of Mars smacked into Earth, spewing a whole bunch of dirt into space that eventually coalesced to form the Moon. This is called the ...

An artistic rendering of a dust and gas disk encircling the young exoplanet, CT Cha b, 625 light-years from Earth. Spectroscopic data from NASA’s JWST suggest the disk contains the raw materials for ...

That timeline is based on analyses of lunar rock samples from NASA’s Apollo missions. But the new study suggests that the moon formed earlier — around 4.51 billion years ago — and then experienced a ...

Scientists have gone back and forth about explanations for the moon's formation for decades, with the general consensus being that it formed during some type of cosmic collision between Earth and a ...

How did the Moon form? Was it from a collision, as has been the longstanding theory, or could it have been captured by the Earth early in our planet’s formation? This is what a recent study published ...

Scientists continue to explore the deep story of how Earth and the moon formed. One idea has gained attention because it pushes us to imagine the planet in its earliest and wildest days.

Two primary theories explain planetary moon formation: gravitational capture within a planet's Hill sphere radius and simultaneous formation with the solar system during its accretion disk phase. A ...

Apollo samples provide evidence: Researchers analyzed Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions and, for the first time, used their iron isotope ratios to trace where Theia originally formed.