Currently, the most widely accepted origin theory for the Moon posits that it was formed 4.51 billion years ago, not long after the Earth, out of the debris from a giant impact between the planet and a hypothesised Mars-sized body called Theia.
Most theories create the Moon by gradual accumulation of the debris from this impact. However, this has been challenged by measurements of lunar rocks showing their composition is like that of Earth’s mantle.
A team from Durham University simulated hundreds of different impacts, varying the angle and speed of the collision as well as the masses and spins of the two colliding bodies in their search for scenarios that could explain the present-day Earth-Moon system.
These calculations were performed using the SWIFT open-source simulation code, run on the DiRAC Memory Intensive service, hosted by Durham University.
The extra computational power revealed that lower-resolution simulations can miss out on important aspects...