Known as the giant-impact hypothesis, this proposed event involves a collision between Earth and a hypothetical Mars-sized protoplanet astronomers call Theia.

The moon could have formed in a matter of hours following the giant impact between Earth and a Mars-size protoplanet early in the history of the solar system. The theory comes from new simulations ...

Energy steadily accumulated in the LLVPs, forming supercritical zones of heated light elements. An explosion in the proto-Pacific LLVP—which can be likened to a planetary kimberlite eruption—then ...

A half century after NASA's Apollo 17 lunar module lifted off the moon's northeastern near side quadrant, planetary scientists still don't completely understand when or how our moon first formed. They ...

How did the Moon form and how fast did it happen? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated a potential new ...

Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren’t planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy ...

Earth’s unusually large Moon may not have assembled gradually from a vast ring of debris after all. Under the right conditions, much of it could have emerged as an intact body only hours after another ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. An artist's impression of a moon-forming circumplanetary disk around CT Cha b, and the carbon ...

The Earth’s Moon had a rough start in life. Formed from a chunk of the Earth that was lopped off during a planetary collision, it spent its early years covered by a roiling global ocean of molten ...

The James Webb Space Telescope measured a potential moon-forming disk encircling an exoplanet, NASA recently announced, inviting researchers to observe and study moon formation as it happens, while ...