If you know any bit of information about how the moon was created, new research indicates that everyone has believed wrong.
As the story goes, 4.5 billion years ago, the moon was born as a result of a giant Mars-sized object named Theia crashing into Earth.
This collision was responsible for more than just creating the moon — it also affected the shape, mass and composition of the Earth.
However, new research from the journal Science and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) suggests that this historic collision might not have been as accidental as it seems.
Scientists are reportedly just finding out that influential Theia might have been formed in the solar system right alongside Earth, meaning these two were once upon a time neighbors.
“The most convincing scenario is that most of the building blocks of Earth and Theia originated in the inner Solar System,” said Timo Hopp, a geoscientist and Lab Manager with the MPS and the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, according to Universe Today.
“Earth and Theia are likely to have been neighbors.”
Understandable if you, too, are scratching your head at this new information.
One of the clues that helped scientists figure this out was Earth’s iron content.
When our planet was still forming, a substantial amount of iron trickled into Earth’s core, yet its mantle still had a great amount of iron in it.
All of this means that the planet’s mantle must’ve gotten its iron from elsewhere, aka Theia, later on.
“The composition of a body archives its entire history of formation, including its place of origin,” Thosten Klein of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) said in a statement, according to Space.com.
Despite this new information, some experts are still skeptical about all of it.
“They’ve certainly done a lot of work, taking a smorgasbord of samples and trying to make sense of it all,” Dr. Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, told the New York Times.
“The past really is lost to us,” he said.
Originally published as New study suggests everyone was wrong about where the Moon came from billions of years ago