Did you know that the moon is actually younger than we previously thought? According to the initial theories the moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago but recent research proved differently. The moon was made of the remains of the planet called Thea that hit proto-earth and crashed into pieces but the earth survived. Then from all the magma remains that were revolving around the earth, they cooled down and crashed into one another to form the moon. When they cooled down they turned into different mineral components. The research that gave us the new testament of the moon’s age was performed by the team that included Carnegie’s Richard Carlson and former-Carnegie fellow Maud Boyet. This team of researchers analyzed the rock called ferroan anorthosite that is the oldest moon’s crustal rock. Before they were unable to estimate precisely the moon’s age because they lacked high-tech equipment but now thanks to the new more refined technology they were able to estimate the age to 4.36 billion years, which is much less than the previous estimate of 4.568 billion years. They also analyzed both the lunar and the earth minerals and concluded that the moon and earth’s oldest crust was form at the same time shortly after the impact of Thea. “The extraordinarily young age of this lunar sample either means that the Moon solidified significantly later than previous estimates, or that we need to change our entire understanding of the Moon’s geochemical history,” Carlson said.
