# The Earth-Moon-Theia hypothesis



## Brian G Turner (Jun 6, 2014)

A fascinating article on the BBC about how some scientists think they have found a way to identify Theia's footprint:
BBC News - Traces of another world found on the Moon



> Researchers have found evidence of the world that crashed into the Earth billions of years ago to form the Moon.
> 
> Analysis of lunar rock brought back by Apollo astronauts shows traces of the "planet" called Theia.
> 
> ...


----------



## Dozmonic (Jun 6, 2014)

It's a theory that always made sense to me. The Pacific covers a third of the planet and is a pretty deep wound


----------



## HareBrain (Jun 6, 2014)

Dozmonic said:


> The Pacific covers a third of the planet and is a pretty deep wound



The ocean floor stabilised much later than this event, surely? In any case, until 300m years ago the "pacific" was pretty much the whole earth, with the single ocean Panthalassa surrounding the single supercontinent Pangea.


----------



## Stephen Palmer (Jun 9, 2014)

All true, HareBrain.

The Theia thing happened about 4.7 billion years ago - we've had any number of tectonic revolutions since then. See also Ted Nield's fantastic book _Supercontinent_ - highly recommended.


----------



## Brian G Turner (Dec 9, 2017)

Just following this up with a couple of later articles - one of which dismisses the claim of finding isotrope differences in the original article, but does suggest this means that Earth and Theia must have had a head-on collision: Moon was produced by head-on collision between Earth and forming planet – Astronomy Now

This later piece talks about how the Earth could have gone into a mad spin - a full rotation every 2 hours - due to the impact, as part of explaining why the moon is angled 5% from the plane of Earth's equator: Did early Earth spin on its side? – Astronomy Now


----------



## Alexa (Dec 10, 2017)

I'm still confused how can someone afirm they have proof of another world on the Moon and call this research. Sorry Brian, but I'm skeptical about this one.


----------



## Brian G Turner (Dec 24, 2017)

And another article on this: Earth was smashed by a rock the size of Mars to make the moon


----------



## Alexa (Dec 24, 2017)

And that was probably the best event for our planet. Without the Moon we would probably not be here talking about it.


----------

