The Earth saw the Moon, liked it and stole it: it was the beginning of a love story 4.5 billion years old

A new scientific hypothesis proposes that the moon did not form from debris, but may instead have been paired with another rocky object: until Earth pulled it towards itself.

That the Earth has its charm, which magnetizes the Moon, was already known, what was not known was that the Moon had a first love, before joining our planet.

With the traditional collision theory (an object the size of Mars would have collided with the Earth, forming debris from which the Moon was born), it is not possible to explain some aspects that intrigue scientists about the rotation of.

Traditional belief also does not explain certain chemical signatures found in lunar rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts, explains .

“The Moon is more aligned with the Sun than with the Earth’s equator”, explains the Penn State researcher Darren Williams in a press release, which does not match the original conception of .

A new one, published in September in The Planetary Science Journal by Williams and Michael Zuggerdemonstrates that the Earth may have “obtained” the Moon through a process called capture by binary exchange — the same mechanism thought to explain how the planet Neptune captured its largest moon, Triton.

The binary exchange capture process occurs when a planet encounters two objects in orbit around each other. During this cosmic encounter, the planet’s gravity can separate the paircapturing one object as a satellite and ejecting the other into space.

The Earth would then have “stolen” the Moon from another object to which it was initially linked by magnetism. A bit like the classic myth of Hades, who kidnapped the goddess of agriculture, Persephone, after falling in love with her, taking her with him to the underworld.

This mechanism has already been demonstrated for larger planets in the solar system, but this new investigation shows how The “capture” scheme can also work for planets the size of Earth.

In fact, the study proved, using mathematical models and computer simulations, that the Earth, after all, has the capacity to capture satellites that are 1% to 10% of its mass (and the Moon is only 1.2% of the Earth’s mass).

But researchers also had to explain how the Moon, already captured, settled in its current circular orbit, so “well behaved”as Study Finds describes it. And this is where the power of the tides comes into play.

As tidal forces “civilized” an initially wild orbit: “Currently, the Earth’s tide is ahead of the Moon,” explains Williams in the same statement. “High tide accelerates the orbit. It gives you a boost, a little boost. Over time, the Moon moves a little further away.”

According to Study Finds, this discovery raises the possibility that large moons may be more common around rocky planets than previously thoughtwhich could even have implications for habitability and the emergence of life. It also explains some, such as the chemical “marks” that were unknown on the Moon.

“No one knows how the Moon formed. Over the past four decades, we had a possibility of how the Moon got there. Now we have two. This opens up a treasure trove of new questions and opportunities for future study,” says Williams.

But unlike Persephone, who regularly continued to emerge from the underworld to visit her mother, the Moon appears to be content in her relationship — otherwise she would not have supported planet Earth 4.5 billion years ago. For now, there are no signs of divorce.