Where did our moon come from?
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Hey, ShortRivers, Emily Kwong here, and I don't know about you, but nothing grounds me quite like looking at the moon, this beautiful, powerful companion to Earth. And for the first time in over 50 years, humans have traveled around the moon.
3, 2, 1, booster ignition. And lift off. And we have a beautiful moon rise. We're headed right at it. We have reached the closest point of our destination to the moon.
And back on the Artemis II mission.
Houston Integrity, splashdown, sending post landing command now. A new chapter of the exploration of our celestial neighbor is complete. Integrity's astronauts, back on Earth.
And all of this moon joy has got me thinking about everything the moon has been through. Because she's been through a lot. Yes. Regina Barber, my shortwave co-host and astrophysics queen. Yes. Also our resident moon connoisseur. True. Mistress of moons. I like that one. Okay, speaking of names, other moons have names, like Europa.
Yeah, so Europa is one of Jupiter's large moons. It's my favorite moon. But today's episode is all about Earth's moon.
What is the origin story of Earth's moon?
Some people call it Luna, but its name is the Moon with a capital M. With a capital M. What is then the leading hypothesis on how she was born? Through a collision.
by a giant impact with a Mars-sized body named Theia and Earth that then shot out magma from the Earth and that balled up and formed the moon. Wow.
Yeah, that's Kelsey Preisel, a volcanic rock planetary chemist at Purdue University.
I have so many questions. Like, where did Thea come from? Why did she come for us? And how did the moon come to stay in our orbit and be so round and so beautiful?
Em, I love your enthusiasm. I'm here for you. And actually, I had my own questions too. So we'll tackle them all today.
So today on the show, our moon. We try to answer one of the most enduring questions. How was the moon made and how do we know? And what does all of this have to do with water's origin story? You are listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
All right, Gina, I know you love Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Yes. But where does our homegrown moon rank for you?
It's my second favorite. I actually have a phase of the moon tattoo. It's the first tattoo I've ever got. It's a cool tattoo. Thank you. And Em, you might think this love comes from childhood because it's so deep.
Mm-hmm.
But kind of like Kelsey, the planetary scientist we heard from earlier, I learned a lot of what I know about the mood now when I was in college.
There's been other impacts throughout Earth's history that often coincide with mass extinctions. And so when I was first learning about it, I was thinking of impacts are this crazy catastrophic thing that happens. Little did I know they could form a brand new planetary body.
An impact that gave us our moon. This is the hypothesis I want to learn more about. Before we get into it, though, are there other competing hypotheses? Yeah.
So there are ones that like don't involve a collision at all. So the moon could have just been made the same way Earth was made in this planetary disk around the sun. All this rock and debris like clumping together. Think of the sun and having rings like Saturn.
I've heard early solar system formation is like roller derby. It's just all these players like knocking each other around.
Colliding into each other, totally. Yeah. So there's another hypothesis I talked about with Tab Preisel, a planetary scientist also at Purdue.
This moon capture idea that there was already a moon body somewhere in the solar system that sort of got captured up there. into Earth's gravitational orbit.
Oh, I'm going to call this the Jimmy Stewart theory.
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