Abstract
About 100 million years after the formation of Earth, a Mars-sized object, Theia, struck our world, not head on but at an angle, delivering large quantities of radioactive elements to enrich Earth’s core and ejecting a sizable mass of our planet’s mantle material into orbit around it. The primordial Earth also lost most of its water in this momentous event (it probably had a global ocean some 100 km deep). Over several million years, the ejected mass coalesced to form the body we now call the Moon.
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English, N. (2014). Our Glorious Moon. In: Grab 'n' Go Astronomy. The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0826-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0826-4_11
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