The Moon could have formed immediately after a cataclysmic impact that tore off a chunk of Earth and hurled it into space, a new study has suggested.
"What we have learnt is that it is very hard to predict how much resolution you need to simulate these violent and complex collisions reliably – you simply have to keep testing until you find that increasing the resolution even further stops making a difference to the answer you get," Jacob Kegerreis, a computational cosmologist at Durham University in England, told Live Science.
Theia's broken remains, along with some vaporized rocks and gas ripped from our young planet's mantle, slowly mingled into a disk around which the molten sphere of the Moon coalesced and cooled over millions of years. Doing so accurately is no simple computational task, so the scientists used a supercomputer to run the program: a system nicknamed COSMA at Durham University's Distributed Research Utilising Advanced Computing facility .
"With a higher resolution we can study more detail – much like how a larger telescope lets you take higher resolution images of distant planets or"Secondly, perhaps even more importantly, using too low a resolution in a simulation can give you misleading or even simply wrong answers," he added.
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