To Make a Big Moon, Start with a Small Planet - Rocky Edition
In this simulation, a rocky impactor 13% of Earth’s mass collides with a rocky protoplanet 87% Earth’s mass. Particles with a red-orange color are forsterite from the bodies’ mantles. Dark red particles have low entropy, or low thermodynamic energy, and yellow-white particles have high entropy. Gray particles represent the iron core. Because the collision debris only had a small fraction of volatile materials, it was able to coalesce into a fractionally large moon. Credit: Nakajima et al. (2022), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28...
Read more on Eos.org: https://eos.org/articles/to-make-a-bi...
