A large asteroid once considered the greatest known risk to Earth may now be on track for a direct hit — not on our planet, ...

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

When high-velocity asteroids land on Earth, they can form a meteor impact crater. Such collisions have occurred throughout ...

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 ...

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.

Look east around 4 a.m. local time, just before dawn, to see the slender form of the crescent moon climb above the horizon.

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 ...