Emily Kwong

I was really surprised.

I mean, the spores just went out.

They were just fantastic.

After nine months in space, more than 80% of these spores germinated once they were back on Earth.

From this, scientists calculate the spores could go about 15 years in space conditions and still germinate.

The team published their results in the journal iScience.

But the scientists have only shown that the spores can survive, you know?

They haven't shown that the moss, the green fuzzy stuff that you see on Earth can grow in space under this extreme radiation.

Now, a new paper in the journal Science is attempting to figure out what this object, Theia, was made out of and where in the solar system it came from.

Here's how Kelsey Preisel put it.

She's a geochemist from Purdue University who didn't work on this study.

Well, they looked at lunar samples brought back from NASA's Apollo missions and other meteorites from our solar system and comparing those samples to rock samples from Earth...

They found that Theia the Earth Smasher could have been born even closer to the sun than Earth.

So Theia was born in the inner solar system.

Now, water could have come from comets.

It could have formed when the Earth did.

Though to truly solve the debate, we're just going to need to gather more space rocks.

Because if they did indeed come from closer to the sun, we would need samples from Venus or Mercury to prove it.

Tyler Jones checked the facts.

Zimon Laszlo Janssen and Damian Herring were the audio engineers.