One significant finding is that the moon-forming impact likely occurred 60-175 million years after the solar system’s birth. The Early Earth and Moon. After the moon-forming collision, ...

One significant finding is that the moon-forming impact likely occurred 60-175 million years after the solar system’s birth. Samples of lunar rock brought back by the Apollo 15 mission.

The South Pole-Aitken basin is the moon's oldest and largest visible crater—a massive geological wound 4 billion years old that preserves secrets about the moon's early history, much like a ...

But the most successful ones involved a moon-forming impact that sent the Earth spinning extremely fast–as much as twice the rate predicted by other models.

A giant, Moon-forming impact as late as the rock samples suggested seemed pretty unlikely. What did we suggest? This is where Kleine, Morbidelli, and I came in.

Billions of years ago, in the frozen edges of the solar system, a violent impact shaped one of space’s oddest pairs. Instead of a typical planet-moon setup, Pluto and Charon became a binary system.

Pluto landed its largest moon, Charon, with a 'kiss'—overturning decades of scientific assumptions about how planetary bodies form and evolve. This is the conclusion of a new study, conducted at ...

If Charon hit Pluto at a relatively sedate speed of about 2,000 mph – 10 times as slow as the Earth’s moon-forming impact – the two would have remained in contact for about 10 hours before ...

From the distribution and shapes of those mountain-like features, the team realized that the impact should have created a more circular crater from which significant chunks of planet-forming ...