Was the Moon-forming impactor isotopically Earth-like? · revision history
Revision 1
Accepted · first revision · record
- Title
- Was the Moon-forming impactor isotopically Earth-like?
- Plain
- The isotope puzzle disappears if the impactor formed in the same neighborhood of the solar system as Earth. Whether that is plausible depends on where the planets' building blocks came from.
- Precise
- Determine whether the impactor (Theia) formed from the same isotopic reservoir as the proto-Earth, for example an enstatite-chondrite-like inner-disk source, so that the Earth-Moon match follows without mixing. An answer is a probability, from planet-formation models calibrated on meteorite isotope anomalies (O, Ti, Cr, Mo, Zr), that two such embryos share isotopes within measured limits.
- Settled by
- N-body formation models with isotopic tracking compared to the measured Earth-Moon differences.
- Kind
- well-posed
- Answer type
- value
- References
- (empty)
- Literature status
- open
- Status note
- (empty)
- Posed since
- (empty)