This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The Moon has been a point of fascination in ...

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 ...

The conventional explanation for the moon's formation is that an enormous rock smashed into the nascent Earth and created it as a result. A new theory challenges the particulars of how events may have ...

Recent scientific modeling has proposed a fascinating theory about how Pluto captured its largest moon, Charon. The theory suggests a novel “kiss and capture” event, where the two celestial bodies ...

Using advanced models, SwRI led new research that indicates that the formation of Pluto and Charon may parallel that of the Earth-Moon system. In the resulting “kiss-and-capture” regime, Pluto and ...

Scientists have shown how the freezing of a ‘slushy’ ocean of magma may be responsible for the composition of the Moon’s crust. The scientists, from the University of Cambridge and the Ecole normale ...

Over 4.6 billion years ago, Earth took shape from a spinning cloud of dust and gas surrounding the young sun. Tiny particles within this cloud collided and clumped together, driven by gravity and ...

There's a new theory for how the Moon came to be that would solve some of the Giant Impact Hypothesis' issues. If Earth had a magma ocean on it already, a lot of problems work out. Share on Facebook ...

A pair of NASA spacecraft detected tiny variations in the Moon's gravitational pull, which may be the result of a dense layer sinking to the bottom. Reading time 2 minutes During its early years of ...