A new study challenges the widely accepted timeline of the moon's formation, proposing that it originated around 4.51 billion years ago and underwent a dramatic re-melting event. This event, caused by the Earth's gravitational pull as the moon drifted away, is believed to have altered the lunar surface and obscured its true age.
That timeline is based on analyses of lunar rock samples from NASA’s Apollo missions. But the new study suggests that the moon formed earlier — around 4.51 billion years ago — and then experienced a dramatic “re-melting” event at the time other scientists had assumed it first formed. The melting occurred as the moon was moving away from the Earth, the authors say, when the planet’s constant gravitational tugs warped the moon in a way that caused it to super-heat.
The process altered the lunar surface and thus hid the moon’s real age, according to the study.Francis Nimmo, the study’s lead author and a professor in the Earth & Planetary Sciences Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said the extreme heating likely re-melted the moon’s surface, effectively “resetting all the clocks” in lunar rocks. NASA announced Thursday that the next Artemis mission, which will send four astronauts on a flight around the moon, will be delayed until 2026. “So the moon rocks are not telling us when the moon formed, but they are telling us when a later event happened that heated the moon,” he said.Within the scientific community, there have been disagreements about the moon’s precise age for decades; Nimmo and his colleagues are not the first to put forward an older estimate. The new findings add to a growing consensus that there may be more to the moon’s history than what the Apollo samples revealed. Planetary scientists have, for instance, struggled to explain how a major collision created the moon 4.35 billion years ago, at a time in the solar system’s history when most large celestial objects were thought to have already clumped together to form planets. “The people who studied the Apollo samples had their reasonable guess for the age of the moon, but people who model how planets in the solar system formed always found it hard to explain how there was still so much big stuff flying around 200 million years after the solar system formed,” Nimmo said
MOON FORMATION RE-MELTING LUNAR ROCK COSMOLOGY
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