Ancient Aliens on the Moon Read Free Page A

then that the capture theory completely fell apart.
    Logically, if the Moon was just wandering by and somehow magically captured by the Earth’s gravitational field – which remember is weaker than the Sun’s hold on it—then a couple of assumptions therefore follow. The first is that since the Moon by definition would have formed somewhere else, it should not be made up of materials similar to Earth or of the same relative age. That’s where the moon rocks came in. What they showed is that not only is the Moon made up of the same “stuff” as the Earth, it was, like the Earth, formed some 4.5 billion years ago. So all things considered, the capture theory didn’t ever really get off the ground. But it did give rise to another idea, which became all the rage for a period of time in the late 1970’s. This was the “co-accretion theory.”
    The co-accretion theory arose from the accretion theory of planetary formation (which I thoroughly dismantled in my last book, The Choice). This idea, initially advocated by the French astronomer Edouard Roche, argues that planets are formed by simply coalescing from the leftover dust and debris of exploded stars. These debris clouds are called “nebula” by the astronomical community, and the idea is that clumps of material begin to form in these primordial nebula, run into each other, magically glue themselves together, and eventually become planets. Roche simply expanded the notion so that the Earth and Moon formed literally side by side, just as we see them today. However, the co-accretion theory cannot account for why the Moon is so much less dense than the Earth, or why it has such a small core and virtually no heavy elements. Logically, if they formed together in the same region of the primordial soup, they should have similar compositions and densities. Not only that, but the CO–accretion theory could not account for the high amount of angular momentum (spin energy) in the Earth-Moon system.

    Artists depiction of the capture theory. (NASA)

    So, having pretty much struck out by the late 1970’s, the planetary scientists began to seize on a new theory of how the Earth-Moon system formed; the “Big Whack” theory.
    Re-dubbed the Giant Impact Hypothesis, this new idea said that a large, Mars sized object struck the Earth sometime in the distant past (about 4.5 billion years ago, by most estimates). This impact ejected a huge amount of material off the Earth and into the Moon’s orbit, where it cooled, coalesced and formed a completely new body we know today as our sister Moon. This massive object is sometimes called Thea , after the Greek Titan that was the mother of Selene, the Moon goddess of ancient Greek mythology. Advocates of the Giant Impact Hypothesis (let’s just call it the GIH from now on) point to what they argue are several lines of evidence to support it. Primary among these are that the Earth’s and the Moon’s orbit are in the same direction (possibly indicating they had a common origin point in the solar system), and the fact (derived from moon rocks brought back the Apollo astronauts) that the lunar surface was once nearly entirely molten.
    Of course, there are also problems with the GIH. First, an impact such as the one required to make the GIH work would have probably melted the entire surface of the Earth into a molten magma ocean, at least for a brief period of time. Since there is no geologic evidence that such a global melt ever took place, that finding in of itself pretty much shoots down the GIH theory. Further proof that the GIH is wrong was recently found in the study of titanium oxygen isotopes from the Moon, Earth and meteors. The study, which is kind of a planetary paternity test, found that Moon rocks and Earth rocks had virtually identical oxygen isotopic ratios, meaning that the Earth and Moon are chemically exactly the same. This has two implications; first that the Moon formed from the Earth, and second that there was no giant