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Solar System

An incredible likeness of being

Nature volume 520, pages 169–170 (2015)Cite this article

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Earth and the Moon share many puzzling chemical similarities. New analyses show that the last planet-sized body to hit Earth could have been similar enough to Earth to yield a Moon with an Earth-like composition. See Letter p.212

Some 4.5 billion years ago, our planet grew through a series of violent collisions with other planet-sized bodies, the last of which is thought to have produced the Moon. The impact of a roughly Mars-sized body with Earth can account for the Moon's mass and unusually small iron core, as well as Earth's rapid early spin rate, but it creates a Moon derived mainly from the impacting planet rather than from Earth1. It has been thought, mainly on the basis of the observed differences between Earth and Mars, that the impactor's composition would differ substantially from that of Earth2, and thus would most naturally produce a Moon distinct from Earth in its chemical composition. Instead, Earth and the Moon are nearly chemically identical in many respects. Now, in a paper on page 212, Mastrobuono-Battisti and colleagues3 estimate a substantial probability — of the order of 20% — that the giant impactor had an Earth-like composition, offering at least a partial solution to the 'isotopic crisis'4 facing the impact theory.

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Figure 1: Oxygen isotopic similarities and differences.

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  1. Robin M. Canup is at the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado 80302, USA.,

    Robin M. Canup

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Correspondence to Robin M. Canup.

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Canup, R. An incredible likeness of being. Nature 520, 169–170 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520169a

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