The familiar lunar vista humans see when they look up at night reveals a face with dark “seas” and bright craters. The mysterious far side, which wasn’t revealed until humans started sending probes and then people in the 1960s, is far more heavily cratered, with few of the dark plains of the near side.
But what caused the two sides to be so different? That’s been a matter of debate.
Now, researchers led by Meng-Hua Zhu, from the Macau University of Science and Technology, say that a dwarf planet striking the moon sometime after its initial formation could have caused the lopsided world we see today. They published their research May 20 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
The standard story of the moon’s formation is that sometime in Earth’s early history, a planet-sized body struck our planet, throwing material high into space, where it eventually coalesced into the ...
