The Moon is born
The Moon is born
The planets in the Solar System developed within a few tens of millions of years after its formation, 4.567 billion years ago. During that time, many protoplanets were still wandering through the young Solar System, in some cases on a collision course with the young planets. Earth was also hit by one of these protoplanets 4.425 billion years ago. This led to the birth of the Moon, the timing of which scientists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the University of Münster have now been able to determine using model calculations. This means that the Moon is slightly younger than previously thought. The impacting protoplanet could have been the size of Mars and caused the ejection of enormous amounts of rock from Earth’s mantle, some of which even evaporated, into space. The Moon was formed from this material in the course of a few thousand years.
