Is iron rain the reason why Earth and the moon are so different?
Tuesday, March 3, 2015 - 08:30
in Astronomy & Space
New experiments show that the asteroids that slammed into Earth and the moon more than 4 billion years ago were vaporised into a mist of iron. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, suggest that the iron mist thrown up from the high velocity impacts of these asteroids travelled fast enough to escape the moon's gravity, but stayed gravitationally stuck on more massive Earth. And these results may help explain why the chemistry of the Earth and the moon differ.