Birth of the Moon: a Runaway Nuclear Reaction?

An anonymous reader writes "How the Moon arose has long stumped scientists. Now Dutch geophysicists argue that it was created not by a massive collision 4.5 billion years ago, but by a runaway nuclear reaction deep inside the young Earth."

Comments

Re:Impactors all the way

[Maury Markowitz]

> it would have had to be between Venus' and Mars' orbits.

They quote this as a problem?!

The baseline assumption is that the impactor formed in the Earth's trojans, which fixes this "complaint" perfectly. Unlike Jupiter (for instance), the Earth's trojans are not entirely stable, and any large objects placed in it will drift back and forth. This explains a VERY large number of data points:

1) it explains geological makeup perfectly
2) it explains why the impact angle was grazing
3) it explains why the Moon formed so long after the Earth

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis

Maury

Re:Teach the hypothetical controversy!

[db32]

Just to be fair to everyone here, there will be a variety of Christian-minded skepticism. To lump them all into one bunch is pretty dishonest.

We have group #1 that is going to claim the literalist nonsense. These are the folks that built the creationist fantasy tourist trap where children frolick with dinos in the displays.

We have group #2 that is probably going to take the approach you mentioned to various degrees. Some may say it could have been spontaneously created, but that is no reason to not investigate, we don't have a lot of good information yet. The other end will lean towards the idea that we haven't found any information yet and thus it must be spontaneously created. This is the realm of curable ignorance on one side and pseudoscience nonsense on the other.

Then we will have the final group, that thankfully has gained at least some traction. The group that will say "Sure God created it...and a runaway nuclear reaction or massive impact are two possible methods that the universe played out that caused it to be created...let's go figure it out." Despite the common slashdot groupthink on this subject, there are indeed quite a few very intelligent people that also hold religious beliefs and don't let those religious beliefs muddy up the science. Francis Collins and Ken Miller are two examples that jump to mind. (In fact, if you haven't seen Ken Miller's video on the ID/Dover trial business, it's about 2hrs, but it is an amazing lecture.)