A "significant amount" of water was discovered in moon rock samples this week collected by NASA'S Apollo astronauts according to SPACE.com. The discovery rivals the main theory on how the moon formed.

"It's thought that the moon's formation involved the materials getting very hot," said Paul Warren, a UCLA cosmochemist who was not involved in the new study. "It's usually assumed that little water would have survived through that."

For a long time, scientists have believed the moon came to be after an object the size of Mars smashed into Earth early on in the planet's history, "generating" a ring of debris that slowly formed together over the course of millions of years.

The process essentially canceled out the water-forming element hydrogen, but if the new studies are correct, the original moon formation theory is not possible according to SPACE.com.

Scientists recently studied a number of different moon rocks collected from the lunar surface in the early 1970s during the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions and found water. The water found in the rocks wasn't the liquid form however, but what is known as hydroxyl, a chemical that includes the oxygen and hydrogen ingredients of water.

"I still think the impact scenario is the best formation scenario for the moon, but we need to reconcile the theory of hydrogen," study leader Hejiu Hui, an engineering researcher at the University of Notre Dame, told SPACE.com.

Previous records indicate water-forming elements came to the moon from "outside sources" before the moon's crust cooled. This explanation would not account for the amount of water found recently in the Apollo samples however.

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