TUCZON, Ariz. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- The moon is the brightest light in the night sky. We've sent space missions there, people have written countless songs and poems about it and now, astrophysicists are providing new insight on how the Earth's moon was created and what makes it special.
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"Well, the moon is certainly the most dramatic thing in the sky, so I'm sure people have had ideas about where it came from the beginning," George Rieke, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Ariz., told Ivanhoe.
Dr. Rieke says our moon is unique -- formed by a massive collision in space. "There was another planet about the size of Mars that was on a disastrous orbit across the Earth's orbit and so the Earth and this other planet ran into each other," he says.
It happened 30 to 50 million years after the formation of the sun. "It was a huge collision that threw dust and debris out into space and some of that material somehow reassembled and orbited around the Earth and eventually built up a moon," Dr. Rieke explained.
Now, an infrared detector like this one on NASA's Spitzer Telescope is giving University of Arizona astrophysicists a wealth of new information from space. Researchers looked for evidence of dust debris around 430-million-year-old stars. Surprisingly, only one star was surrounded by dust, revealing that no other moon was formed like or since ours. "Nothing like that occurred around any of the other planets in our solar system," Dr. Rieke said.
Scientists believe our moon set the stage for life on earth as we know it. But it could have been very different.
"It could have been, if the other planet was a little bit bigger that it would have just destroyed the Earth and there wouldn't be any Earth left," Dr. Rieke explained.
You may never look at the moon quite the same way again. "We should be a lot more thankful when we go out at night and find our way around through the full moonlight or just admire what it looks like," Dr. Rieke said.
Astrophysicists believe that moons like the Earth's form in only five to ten percent of planetary systems in our universe.
The American Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
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