Billions of years ago, so the theory goes, something around the size of Mars smacked into Earth, spewing a whole bunch of dirt into space that eventually coalesced to form the Moon. This is called the ...

China’s Chang’e-6 mission has returned nearly two kilograms of rock and soil from the moon’s far side, and the laboratory results are forcing scientists to rethink how the moon formed and evolved.

Eons ago, in the frigid depths of our solar system, a dramatic collision occurred between two icy worlds. Instead of a catastrophic smash-up, the two bodies "kissed," merging temporarily like a ...

How did the Moon form? Was it from a collision, as has been the longstanding theory, or could it have been captured by the Earth early in our planet’s formation? This is what a recent study published ...

New modeling of the early solar system is reshaping the familiar story of how the Moon formed, suggesting that Earth and the impactor known as Theia may have spent their youth circling the Sun as near ...

The moon may be more than 100 million years older than some scientists previously thought, according to a new study. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, challenges the ...

India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission has obtained the first measurements of the composition of the soil near the Moon’s south pole 1. The minerals found offer further evidence that the lunar surface was ...

Scientists have shown how the freezing of a ‘slushy’ ocean of magma may be responsible for the composition of the Moon’s crust. The scientists, from the University of Cambridge and the Ecole normale ...

The Moon formed a little later than previously assumed. When a Mars-sized protoplanet was destroyed in a collision with the young Earth, a new body was created from the debris ejected during this ...

Earth's calm and cool lunar companion may indeed once have been a roiling ball of molten rock, new research has found. The moon has been long theorized to have formed due to a Mars-sized planet named ...

The research suggests that lunar rock samples from the Apollo missions date to an event that melted the moon's surface — not to the moment it formed. The authors therefore think the moon formed around ...