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 ...

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 ...

The story of creation, whether of worlds or moons, has long fascinated humanity. For decades, most scientists agreed that the Moon was born from a violent collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body ...

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 ...

We already know a decent amount about how planets form, but moon formation is another process entirely, and one we're not as familiar with. Scientists think they understand how the most important moon ...

The Moon has long been the Earth's close companion, but researchers have struggled to understand exactly when the moon formed, because tiny crystals in the moon rocks brought home by astronauts ...

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 ...