Creating Earth and Moon #poem #poetry #space #Moon #solarsystem

Did Theia and proto Earth’s mantle vaporize and merge?

Terrestrial and lunar rocks

Share similarities,

The isotopes of elements

Found in both of these.

Early in the solar system,

When proto-worlds collide,

Such isotopic matching

Is hard to reconcile.

New research seeks a better scheme

And everyone is trying,

Potassium in rocks may show

Which models are complying.

Perhaps the rogue colliding spheres

Vaporized Earth’s mantle

To atmospheres of gaseous rock,

Of fluids supercritical.

Then Earth and Moon, upon their face,

Would match in just this way.

Their composition now makes sense

At least, it does today.

By Kate Rauner

Thanks to space.com for their article on the birth of the Moon, and to Kun Wang (Washington University) and Stein Jacobsen (Harvard) for their findings online September 12 in the journal Nature. The Mars-sized rock that collided with Earth is called Theia, named for the mother of the Moon in Greek myth, but I just couldn’t work that into the poem[image error]Where did the moon come from