Roughly four and a half billion years ago the planet Theia slammed into Earth, destroying Theia, melting large fractions of Earth’s mantle and ejecting a huge debris disk that later formed the moon. Scientists have long wondered what Theia was made of and where it came from. Now they have evidence that it formed very close to home.
The original giant impact model of the moon’s creation, proposed in the 1970s, predicted the moon was made mostly of Theia’s material. This scenario implied there should be differences in the chemical composition of the moon and Earth, but research has found that the two are nearly identical—far more similar than two independent planetary bodies should be. A new study, published today in Science, took a close look at other things Theia gave us beside the moon: additional molybdenum and iron left behind in the collision.
Ancient Earth would have had these heavy elements accumulate in its core but not in the rocky mantle closer to the surface, so any iron present now in Earth’s mantle likely came from Theia and can tell us about that planet’s composition, says study co-author Thorsten Kleine, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.
That is the teaser for a serious article from a publication largely taken over by the left since I stopped subscribing about 1981. The fun aspect is how the 11/20/25 New York Times covered this with a title that mocks the "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers popular with the Alex Jones fans:
The Moon Was an Inside Job
New research suggests that Theia, the object whose collision with Earth is theorized to have caused the formation of the moon, came from closer to the sun.
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