The hypothesis (credited to Charles Darwin’s son George in 1879) is that the Earth and Moon began as a mass of molten rock spinning rapidly enough that gravity was just barely greater than the centrifugal forces. Even a slight kick could dislodge part of the mass into orbit, where it would become the Moon. The hypothesis has been around for 130 years, but was rejected because no one could explain a source of the energy required to kick a moon-sized blob of molten rock into orbit.Would have been good to watch.Dutch scientists Rob de Meijer (University of the Western Cape) and Wim van Westrenen (Amsterdam’s VU University) think they know the answer. Their hypothesis is that the centrifugal forces would have concentrated heavy elements like thorium and uranium on the equatorial plane and at the Earth core-mantle boundary. If the concentrations of these radioactive elements were high enough, this could have led to a nuclear chain reaction that became supercritical, causing a nuclear explosion.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A novel suggestion
The Moon may have formed in a nuclear explosion:
Dunno,
ReplyDeleteI prefer the impact theory (a mass roughly the size of Mars smacked into the Earth about 4 something Billion years ago). This accounts well for the similar compositions of the flood basalts on the Moons surface to Earth basalts.
Both would be spectacular, of course, but I like the idea of a barely formed planet suddenly blowing itself up.
ReplyDeleteHeh,
ReplyDeleteInspiration for the Death Star??