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Our Moon May Have Formed From Multiple Small Ones, Says Report (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: A series of cosmic collisions may have spawned multiple moonlets that morphed into the one big moon we know today. Rather than one giant impact that knocked off part of early Earth and created the moon, a number of smaller collisions may have produced lots of mini-moons, Israeli scientists reported Monday. And those mini-moons, over millions of years, may have clumped together to make one large one. The researchers conducted nearly 1,000 computer simulations and estimate about 20 impacts could do the job. They say that would explain why the moon seems to be composed of material from Earth, rather than some other planet, too. It's actually an old theory revitalized now by the Weizmann Institute of Science's Raluca Rufu in Rehovot, Israel, and his team. Their findings were published in Nature Geoscience.
this is what modern science is reduced to, old theories joined to faddish techs that can be easily trailered to fit the theory.
No, this is what science has always been: chasing existing theories, testing them from different angles, trying to find weak points. Only a vanishingly small part of scientific discovery is about making a huge, new discovery. But what we see here, and what you are complaining about is really the poor journalism that tries to inflate good, but humdrum scientific results and make a sexy sounding headline out of it. And once again it has served its purpose: to attract clicks to slashdot's website, which translates into advertising revenue. From their point of view scientific accuracy only matters in as much as it increases revenue - they don't care if the clicks come from real scientists and engineers or clueless teenagers.