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Science 14 May 2004:
Vol. 304. no. 5673, pp. 977 - 979
DOI: 10.1126/science.1097059
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Perspectives

PLANETARY SCIENCE:
The Giant Impact Formation of the Moon

Herbert Palme

Over the past 30 years, planetary scientists have come to accept that the Moon was formed by the impact of a large body with Earth. In his Perspective, Palme discusses work reported recently by Canup in which sophisticated numerical simulations of this type of collision were performed. Earlier simulations used a small number of particles to model the collision, whereas Canup's work uses up to 120,000 particles. The results provide the most detailed predictions to date of where the material that makes up the Moon might have originated.

The author is at the Institut für Geologie und Mineralogie, Universität zu Köln, 50674 Köln, Germany. E-mail: palme{at}gwp-min.min.uni-koeln.de

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Prebiotic materials from on and off the early Earth.
M. Bernstein (2006)
Phil Trans R Soc B 361, 1689-1702
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Neodymium isotope evidence for a chondritic composition of the Moon..
K. Rankenburg, A. D. Brandon, and C. R. Neal (2006)
Science 312, 1369-1372
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)