Where did the Moon come from? A new theory | Sarah T. Stewart

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2019

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Earth and Moon are like identical twins, made up of the exact same materials -- which is really strange, since no other celestial bodies we know of share this kind of chemical relationship. What's responsible for this special connection? Looking for an answer, planetary scientist and MacArthur "Genius" Sarah T. Stewart discovered a new kind of astronomical object -- a synestia -- and a new way to solve the mystery of the Moon's origin.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features planetary scientist Sarah T. Stewart, recorded live at TED Salon, Imagine If 2019.
0:11.0	Nobody likes to make a mistake, and I made a whopping one.
0:18.0	And figuring out what I did wrong led to a discovery
0:22.7	that completely changes the way we think about the Earth and Moon.
0:27.9	I'm a planetary scientist,
0:30.0	and my favorite thing to do is smash planets together.
0:34.5	In my lab, I can shoot at rocks using cannons like this one.
0:40.3	In my experiments, I can generate the extreme conditions during planet formation.
0:50.3	And with computer models, I can collide whole planets together
0:55.0	to make them grow, or I can destroy them.
1:00.0	I want to understand how to make the Earth and the Moon,
1:05.0	and why the Earth is so different from other planets.
1:09.0	The leading idea for the origin of the Earth and Moon
1:13.5	is called the Giant Impact Theory.
1:16.5	The theory states that a Marsai's body struck the young Earth
1:19.7	and the moon formed from the debris disk around the debris disk around the planet.
1:26.3	The theory can explain so many things about the moon,
1:29.9	but it has a huge flaw.
1:32.7	It predicts that the moon is mostly made from the Mars-sized planet,
1:37.3	that the Earth and the Moon are made from different materials.
1:41.1	But that's not what we see.
1:43.8	The Earth and the Moon are actually like identical twins.
	...

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