The Moon is trust to have formed when a Mars - sized target hit the young Earth billions of age ago . The exact modality and timing are still a subject of speculation but there is a general consensus that it materialize around 4.51 billion years ago , roughly 140 million old age after the birth of the Solar System .
A squad of German research worker has now put forward a retool timeline . According to their calculations , the Moon is more or less youthful , around 4.425 billion years old , plus or minus 25 million years , pull in it 85 million years young than we think . Their subject area is published inScience Advances .
A major issue in go steady the Moon is that none of the rocks found there by the six Apollo missions and the three Soviet robots are old enough . For a tenacious time , the Moon was covered by a magma ocean , up to 1,000 kilometers ( 621 miles ) in deepness . Understanding how long this magma ocean survived is a key footmark in working out the age of our natural satellite .
“ The results from the model show that the Moon ’s magma ocean was long - lived and took almost 200 million years to completely solidify into mantle rock , ” conduct writer Maxime Maurice from the German Aerospace Center ( DLR ) said in astatement .
“ The time scale is much longer than calculated in previous studies , ” contribute DLR colleague Nicola Tosi . “ sr. models give a solidification menstruation of only 35 million years . ”
If their framework is correct , rock across the surface of the Moon must have solidify at unlike points , which would run to rocks having slightly unlike compositions . The team was able to acquire a fashion model for the rock makeup and their ages . The next step was to equate them to the actual lunar stone , and that ’s where the revision to the age of the Moon come about .
“ By compare the measured composition of the Moon ’s rocks with the predicted composition of the magma sea from our model , we were able to trace the phylogenesis of the sea back to its starting pointedness , the time at which the Moon was formed , ” explained co - author Sabrina Schwinger also from DLR .
Interestingly , the geological formation of the Moon as date in this study coincides with the formation of the Earth ’s nitty-gritty forecast with the uranium - lead method acting . If this is the case , the Moon formed at the very end of the shaping of our planet .
