Privileged Planet: how moon formed (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, August 12, 2022, 16:33 (835 days ago) @ David Turell

By getting some of Earth material in a massive collision:

https://www.sciencenewslab.com/space/the-moon-stole-something-from-deep-inside-earth-eo...

Earth and its Moon are unique in the Solar System. Earth is the only planet with just one moon, and that Moon is pretty influential. In fact, without the Moon, life on Earth may not have emerged, some research suggests. (my bold)

"Couple that with a size ratio unlike any other planet-moon system we’ve seen – the Moon is a little over one-quarter the size of Earth – scientists, naturally, are interested in where the Moon even came from. (my bold)

"Isotopes of the noble gasses helium and neon trapped in lunar meteorites recovered from Antarctica match up with those found in the solar wind, without ever having been exposed to it. This, together with a signature argon isotope concentration, suggests that those gasses were inherited from Earth, when the two bodies were one, long ago.

“'Finding solar gasses, for the first time, in basaltic materials from the Moon that are unrelated to any exposure on the lunar surface was such an exciting result,” said cosmochemist Patrizia Will, formerly of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, now at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Directly studying the composition of the Moon is a complicated business. We haven’t been there since 1972, and collected samples are scarce.

"The Moon, however, does occasionally come to us, in the form of meteorites that are thrown in our direction when something large slams into the surface.

"A bunch of these lunar meteorites, or lunaites, have been recovered; there are several hundred that we know of, found all around the world.

***

"The team found the isotope ratios of the neon were very similar to isotope ratios of neon in Earth’s mantle plumes, deep upwellings of hot molten that sample reservoirs of material deep inside Earth that are likely undisturbed since the planet formed, 4.5 billion years ago. This similarity suggests that the gasses came from Earth, the researchers concluded."

Comment: Note my bold in the first paragraph: the moon is vital to life formation on the Earth. And the second bold tells us how unusual the moon is. More contingencies in the course of allowing us to being here. Chance or design? I pick design