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Low retention of impact material by the Moon

Simulations demonstrate that the Moon’s ability to retain material from striking impactors is lower than was previously assumed. This finding helps to explain the scarcity of precious metals in the Moon relative to Earth.
  1. James M. D. Day

    1. James M. D. Day is at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.

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As a planetary body forms, precious metals, such as gold and iridium, are stripped from its rocky mantle and passed into its metallic core. Successive impacts with other objects then re-enrich the mantle in these elements — a process known as late accretion1,2. Measurements of lunar rocks show that the Moon is greatly depleted in precious metals compared with Earth3,4. This deficit implies that the ratio of mass added to Earth during late accretion compared with that added to the Moon is more than 1,000:1, which is substantially different from the predicted ratio5 of about 20:1. In a paper in Nature, Zhu et al.6 show that inefficient delivery of material from glancing impacts, combined with an early hot, molten stage on the Moon, can explain this anomalous input-mass ratio.

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Nature 571, 177-178 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02066-w

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