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Occam's origin of the Moon

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Following almost three decades of some certainty over how the Moon was formed, new geochemical measurements have thrown the planetary science community back into doubt. We are either modelling the wrong process, or modelling the process wrong.

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Figure 1: Following a giant impact, a disk of molten and vaporized debris is thought to have formed around the young Earth (left).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linda T. Elkins-Tanton is in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, D.C. 20015, USA,

    Linda T. Elkins-Tanton

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  1. Linda T. Elkins-Tanton
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Correspondence to Linda T. Elkins-Tanton.

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Elkins-Tanton, L. Occam's origin of the Moon. Nature Geosci 6, 996–998 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2026

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