背景:
Formation
Several mechanisms have been suggested for the Moon's formation. Early speculation proposed that the Moon broke off from the Earth's crust because of centrifugal forces, leaving a basin (presumed to be the Pacific Ocean) behind as a scar.[30] This fission concept, however, requires too great an initial spin of the Earth. Others speculated that the Moon formed elsewhere and was captured into Earth's orbit.[31] However, the conditions required for this capture mechanism to work (such as an extended atmosphere of the Earth for dissipating energy) are improbable. The coformation hypothesis posits that the Earth and the Moon formed together at the same time and place from the primordial accretion disk. In this hypothesis, the Moon formed from material surrounding the proto-Earth, similar to the formation of the planets around the Sun. Some suggest that this hypothesis fails to adequately explain the depletion of metallic iron in the Moon. A major deficiency with all of these hypotheses is that they cannot easily account for the high angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system.[32]
Today, the giant impact hypothesis for forming the Earth–Moon system is widely accepted by the scientific community. In this hypothesis, the impact of a Mars-sized body on the proto-Earth is postulated to have put enough material into circumterrestrial orbit to form the Moon.[1] Given that planetary bodies are believed to have formed by the hierarchical accretion of smaller bodies to larger ones, giant impact events such as this are thought to have affected most planets. Computer simulations modelling this impact are consistent with measurements of the angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system, as well as the small size of the lunar core.[33] Unresolved questions regarding this theory have to do with determining the relative sizes of the proto-Earth and impactor, and with determining how the material from the proto-Earth and the impactor was distributed when it formed the Moon. The formation of the Moon is believed to have occurred 4.527 ± 0.01 billion years ago, about 30–50 million years after the origin of the solar system.[34]作者: 西草 时间: 2010-9-1 10:35