"During the early solar system's game of cosmic billiards, Earth was struck by a neighbor,” said Dauphas. “It was a lucky shot. Without the moon's steadying influence on our planet's tilt, the climate ...

The formation of the Moon may have come harder on the heels of Earth's birth than we thought. According to a new analysis by researchers from the US, France, and Germany, Earth's constant companion ...

About 4.5 billion years ago, a colossal impact between the young Earth and a mysterious planetary body called Theia changed everything—reshaping Earth, forming the Moon, and scattering clues across ...

Eons ago, in the frigid depths of our solar system, a dramatic collision occurred between two icy worlds. Instead of a catastrophic smash-up, the two bodies “kissed,” merging temporarily like a ...

To our best of our understanding, the Moon formed from Earth following a colossal impact. A Mars-sized world we nicknamed Theia slammed and merged with the primordial Earth, throwing material into ...

New research suggests that Theia, the object whose collision with Earth is theorized to have caused the formation of the moon, came from closer to the sun.

A groundbreaking study in Nature has shaken up our understanding of the moon’s formation. This research suggests that the moon was born during Earth’s earliest days, revolutionizing the timeline of ...

The moon is much older than we thought, according to a new analysis conducted by researchers from the United States, France, ...

Billions of years ago, so the theory goes, something around the size of Mars smacked into Earth, spewing a whole bunch of dirt into space that eventually coalesced to form the Moon. This is called the ...

Apollo samples provide evidence: Researchers analyzed Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions and, for the first time, ...

Scientists have gone back and forth about explanations for the moon's formation for decades, with the general consensus being that it formed during some type of cosmic collision between Earth and a ...