ScoreCard of Major Theories of Lunar Creation
Theory Explanations:
Intact Capture:
the Moon was a traveling planetary body that was captured into a stable orbit by Earth’s gravity
Coaccretion:
the Earth and Moon formed as two separate bodies from the same raw planetary materials. They co-accreted together.
Earth Fission:
the early Earth was a larger body that split into two.
Collisional Ejection:
a passing planetary body, possibly the size of Mars, smacked into the early Earth and the Moon formed from a mix of materials from both Earth and Moon
Disintegrative Capture:
By the end of the Kona Conference and, in no small part due to the comparative matrix above, most scientists shifted their opinion on which lunar origin hypothesis was most likely over to the Collisional Ejection model.
ScoreCard of Major Theories of Lunar Creation
ScoreCard of Major Theories of Lunar Creation e3b7bb876d64496eb3eb70ceaba8be3a.csv
Compiled by J.A. Wood at Kona HI Conference Oct 1984
(The similarity of mantle trace element patterns is in parentheses because Wood, the author, was skeptical of the reliability of this as a measure)
Some data points that led to this conclusion:
- Several papers were presented at Kona that conclusively demonstrated that there weren’t any legit coaccretion models that could explain the Earth/Moon angular momentum.
- Several independent models that depicted reasonable data points on the explanatory power of collisional ejection.