Giant Impact Hypothesis - Basic Model of Impact

Basic Model of Impact

Astronomers think the collision between Earth and Theia happened at approximately 4.53 Gya; about 30–50 million years after the Solar System began to form. In astronomical terms, the impact would have been of moderate velocity. Theia is thought to have struck the Earth at an oblique angle when the latter was nearly fully formed. Computer simulations of this "late-impact" scenario suggest an impact angle of about 45° and an initial impactor velocity below 4 km/s. Theia's iron core would have sunk into the young Earth's core, and most of Theia's mantle accreted onto the Earth's mantle, however, a significant portion of the mantle material from both Theia and the Earth would have been ejected into orbit around the Earth. This material quickly coalesced into the Moon (possibly within less than a month, but in no more than a century). Estimates based on computer simulations of such an event suggest that some twenty percent of the original mass of Theia would have ended up as an orbiting ring of debris, and about half of this matter coalesced into the Moon.

The Earth would have gained significant amounts of angular momentum and mass from such a collision. Regardless of the speed and tilt of the Earth's rotation before the impact, it would have experienced a day some five hours long after the impact, and the Earth's equator and the Moon's orbit would have become coplanar in the aftermath of the giant impact.

Not all of the ring material would have necessarily been swept up right away; the thickened crust of the Far Side suggests that a second moon about 1,000-km in diameter formed in a Lagrange point of the Moon; after tens of millions of years, as the two moons migrated outward from the Earth, solar tidal effects would have made the Lagrange orbit unstable, resulting in a slow-velocity collision that would have 'pancaked' the smaller moon onto what is now the Far Side.