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 ...

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 ...

Hubble Space Telescope images have revealed a second massive collision between planetary bodies orbiting the nearby star Fomalhaut, roughly 25 light-years from Earth. The discovery, reported in a peer ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...