Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science

A Captured Moon?

At the 2009 GSA meeting Robert Malcuit "Captured Moon" theory was sufficiently favourably noticed by the Press that it received attention in all the usual sources...

GSA 2009 Annual Meeting

MSNBC News Report

Discovery Channel News 2009

...intrigued I looked into Malcuit's idea further and found he has been working on it since c.1971. In 1987 he performed some breakthrough simulations which showed the capture process was physically reasonable. Now he's trying to overcome the 'hegemony' of the Big Impact paradigm - which is a task of Hercules because the Big Impact explains isotopic data quite well and is backed by a lot of theoretical and simulation work on late-stage impacts during planet formation.

What we can't say anymore is that Capturing the Moon can't happen - it could. Now we have to sift the evidence to see if it did. The isotopic signature of the Inner Planets will be very similar to the Earth/Moon if the Capture theory is correct, but presently we don't have data from either Venus or Mercury of sufficient certainty to tell. Some meteorites might derive from Mercury, but that's uncertain.

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