Provide evidence to support a hypothesis about whether or not the moon has plate tectonics.

The moon formed a hundred million years after the creation of the solar system. This has left scientists wondering what was the cause of our planet's satellite to birth if it didn't come from the events that formation of the planets. Here are just three of the most plausible explanations. 

The prevailing theory supported by the scientific community, the giant impact hypothesis suggests that the moon formed when an object smashed into early Earth. Like the other planets, Earth formed from the leftover cloud of dust and gas orbiting the young sun. The early solar system was a violent place, and a number of bodies were created that never made it to full planetary status. One of these could have crashed into Earth not long after the young planet was created.

Known as Theia, the Mars-sized body collided with Earth, throwing vaporized chunks of the young planet's crust into space. Gravity bound the ejected particles together, creating a moon that is the largest in the solar system in relation to its host planet. This sort of formation would explain why the moon is made up predominantly of lighter elements, making it less dense than Earth — the material that formed it came from the crust, while leaving the planet's rocky core untouched. As the material drew together around what was left of Theia's core, it would have centered near Earth's ecliptic plane, the path the sun travels through the sky, which is where the moon orbits today.

According to NASA, "When the young Earth and this rogue body collided, the energy involved was 100 million times larger than the much later event believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs."

Although this is the most popular theory, it is not without its challenges. Most models suggest that more than 60%of the moon should be made up of the material from Theia. But rock samples from the Apollo missions suggest otherwise.

"In terms of composition, the Earth and moon are almost twins, their compositions differing by at most few parts in a million," Alessandra Mastrobuono-Battisti, an astrophysicist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, told Space.com. "This contradiction has cast a long shadow on the giant-impact model."

In 2020 research published in Nature Geoscience (opens in new tab), offered an explanation as to why the moon and Earth have such similar composition. Having studied the isotopes of oxygen in the moon rocks brought to Earth from Apollo astronauts, researchers discovered that there is a small difference when compared with Earth rocks. The samples collected from the deep lunar mantle (the layer below the crust) were much heavier than those found on Earth and "have isotopic compositions that are most representative of the proto-lunar impactor ‘Theia’", the study authors wrote. 

Back in 2017, Israeli researchers proposed an alternative impact theory (opens in new tab) which suggests that a rain of small debris fell on Earth to create the moon.

"The multiple-impact scenario is a more natural way of explaining the formation of the moon," Raluca Rufu, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and lead author of the study, told Space.com. "In the early stages of the solar system, impacts were very abundant; therefore, it is more natural that several common impactors formed the moon, rather than one special one.

Co-formation theory

Moons can also form at the same time as their parent planet. Under such an explanation, gravity would have caused material in the early solar system to draw together at the same time as gravity bound particles together to form Earth. Such a moon would have a very similar composition to the planet, and would explain the moon's present location. However, although Earth and the moon share much of the same material, the moon is much less dense than our planet, which would likely not be the case if both started with the same heavy elements at their core.

In 2012, researcher Robin Canup, of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, proposed that Earth and the moon formed at the same time when two massive objects five times the size of Mars crashed into each other.

"After colliding, the two similar-sized bodies then re-collided, forming an early Earth surrounded by a disk of material that combined to form the moon," NASA said. "The re-collision and subsequent merger left the two bodies with the similar chemical compositions seen today.

Capture theory

Perhaps Earth's gravity snagged a passing body, as happened with other moons in the solar system, such as the Martian moons of Phobos and Deimos. Under the capture theory, a rocky body formed elsewhere in the solar system could have been drawn into orbit around Earth. The capture theory would explain the differences in the composition of Earth and its moon. However, such orbiters are often oddly shaped, rather than being spherical bodies like the moon. Their paths don't tend to line up with the ecliptic of their parent planet, also unlike the moon.

Although the co-formation theory and the capture theory both explain some elements of the existence of the moon, they leave many questions unanswered. At present, the giant impact hypothesis seems to cover many of these questions, making it the best model to fit the scientific evidence for how the moon was created.

Additional resources

For more on the giant-impact hypothesis, read "The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to be: A Violent Natural History"," by Dana Mackenzie. To learn more about the solar system, check out "Our Solar System: An Exploration of Planets, Moons, Asteroids, and Other Mysteries of Space (opens in new tab)" by Lisa Reichley. 

Bibliography

Erick J. Cano et al, "Distinct oxygen isotope compositions of the Earth and Moon", Nature Geoscience, Volume 13, March 2020, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-0550-0  (opens in new tab)

Raluca Rufu, "A multiple-impact origin for the Moon", Nature Geoscience, Volume 10, January 2017, https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2866 (opens in new tab)

Edward Belbruno et al, "Where Did the Moon Come From? (opens in new tab)", The Astronomical Journal, Volume 129, March 2005.

Thomas S. Kruijer and Gregory Archer, "No 182W evidence for early Moon formation", Nature Geoscience, Volume 14, October 2021, https://doi.org/ (opens in new tab)10.1038/s41561-021-00820-2 (opens in new tab)

It was the Galileo mission, which ended in 2003 when the probe descended into the depths of Jupiter’s atmosphere, that brought us the first solid evidence of an ocean beneath the ice of Europa. Galileo made multiple flybys of the Jovian moon, the first spacecraft to do so, with the closest pass being a scant 180 kilometers on October 15, 2001. As you would imagine, the radiation environment near Europa is hazardous, which is why the flybys were reserved for Galileo’s extended mission. We’ve been mining the Galileo data on Europa ever since.

You may remember that Galileo was unable to open its high-gain antenna on the way to Jupiter, so we had to rely on the ingenuity of mission controllers to get the maximum performance out of the low-gain antenna. That 70 percent of the mission’s science goals were still met, and that we are making new discoveries with the Galileo data today, still amazes me. Now we have new work on Europa that flags the evidence for plate tectonics on the distant moon, which would be the first sign of such activity on any world other than our own.

Simon Kattenhorn (University of Idaho) and Louise Prockter (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory) led this work, which offers visual evidence of the expansion of Europa’s icy crust. A look at Europa’s cracked and ridged surface as sent back by Galileo calls into question how the terrain formed, because while new crust is visible, the mechanism for destroying older crust is not apparent. Kattenhorn and Prockter suggest that this ‘missing terrain’ was absorbed into Europa’s ice shell rather than breaking through it into the ocean that lies beneath. But the evidence for plate tectonics is compelling, and the thickness of the ice shell remains controversial.

Image: Scientists have found evidence of plate tectonics on Jupiter’s moon Europa. This false-color image of the trailing northern hemisphere on Jupiter’s moon Europa — the hemisphere that faces away from Jupiter — shows numerous ridges (red) and band (light-colored) features. Subduction zones — regions where two tectonic plates converge and one is forced beneath the other — may also be present in the study area and are identified by arrows. Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Plate tectonics describes the motion of large plates in the Earth’s outermost shell, causing earthquakes and volcanic activity as well as mountain-building and the formation of trenches in the oceans as the plates meet. Subduction can carry plate material back into the mantle, while new crust can emerge from seafloor spreading. On Europa’s surface, the break up of crustal material and its replacement by bands of fresh ice from below is apparent. The new material fills in broad bands that are kilometers wide. Kattenhorn and Prockter reconstructed what areas of the surface would have looked like before these disruptions occurred.

Just where was the old crust being destroyed so that the new crust could form? When the researchers looked at areas where subduction similar to Earth’s might be occurring on Europa, they found ice volcanoes on the overriding plate. The smoothness of the surface in these areas implied that older material was forced below rather than remaining as crumpled mountainous terrain on the surface. So now we have evidence not only of material moving up through the ice crust but a mechanism for moving surface material back into the shell.

Simon Kattenhorn comments on the significance of the finding:

“Europa may be more Earth-like than we imagined, if it has a global plate tectonic system. Not only does this discovery make it one of the most geologically interesting bodies in the solar system, it also implies two-way communication between the exterior and interior — a way to move material from the surface into the ocean — a process which has significant implications for Europa’s potential as a habitable world.”

Image: Scientists have found evidence of plate tectonics on Jupiter’s moon Europa. This conceptual illustration of the subduction process (where one plate is forced under another) shows how a cold, brittle, outer portion of Europa’s 20–30 kilometer (roughly 10–20 mile) thick ice shell moved into the warmer shell interior and was ultimately subsumed. A low-relief subsumption band was created at the surface in the overriding plate, alongside which cryolavas may have erupted. Image credit: Noah Kroese, I.NK.

Bear in mind the reason for Galileo’s fiery plunge into the Jovian atmosphere. The spacecraft, its systems degrading in the high-radiation environment, its fuel largely spent, was crashed into the giant planet so that there would be no possibility it might contaminate Europa at some point in the future with bacteria from Earth. Europa remains a target of high astrobiological interest, and preventing even the faintest possibility of contamination kept this fascinating moon pristine. We now ponder what kinds of equipment it might take to explore near-Europa space and the surface itself in hopes of finding evidence of life from below.

The paper is Kattenhorn and Prockter, “Evidence for subduction in the ice shell of Europa,” Nature Geoscience, published online 7 September 2014 (abstract). See also this JHU/APL news release.