| Abstract |
Giant impact model of the Moon has been a paradigm in the community for~30 years.
However, there are a few new results on the composition of the Moon that challenge this paradigm. They include the recent observations on the not-so-dry composition and the similarity in the isotopic compositions of some refractory elements. The simple intuition would suggest that the Moon formed by a giant impact would be “dry”, and most of numerical models of Moon formation by a giant impact predict that a large fraction of the Moon would be from the impactor and hence the isotopic composition of the Moon would be different from that of Earth. Therefore a conventional giant impact model would be inconsistent with these geochemical observations. I will discuss possible models to solve these puzzles based largely on the knowledge of material properties such as the phase diagram and the equation of state. |
