Researchers have created a "geologic clock" to help determine the age of the moon and approximately when it formed, according to a Southwest Research Institute press release.
The international team of scientists determined that the Moon is 4.5 billion years old, and formed almost 100 million years after the start of the solar system.
Their conclusion is based on measurements from the interior of the Earth, combined with computer simulations of protoplanetary disk from which other "terrestrial planets" are formed, according to the release.
Researchers from France, the U.S., and Germany simulated the growth of terrestrial planets, like Mercury, Mars, and Earth, from a disk of thousands of planetary building blocks orbiting the Sun.
After analyzing the growth history of the planets from 259 simulations, the researchers determined that Earth was affected greatly after a Mars-sized object hit it to create the Moon.
This data, along with data that measured the amount of material added to Earth after the impact, helped scientists determined there was a relationship between the two, according to the release.
Researchers then made the first "geologic clock" in early solar system history that "does not rely on measurements and interpretations of the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei to determine age," according to the release.
"We were excited to find a 'clock' for the formation time of the Moon that didn't rely on radiometric dating methods. This correlation just jumped out of the simulations and held in each set of old simulations we looked at," says lead author of the Nature article Seth Jacobson of the Observatory de la Cote d'Azur in Nice, France.
The clock helped them determine the range when the moon formed in relation to the beginning of the solar system.
Analyzing this data helped scientists determine that the Moon formed 95 million years after the start of the solar system.
"This result is exciting because in the same simulations that can successfully form Mars in only 2 to 5 million years, we can also form the Moon at 100 million years. These vastly different timescales have been very hard to capture in simulations," said author Dr. Kevin Walsh from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Space Science and Engineering Division, according to National Geographic.
Research was published in the April 3 edition of Nature.
Research was funded by the European Research Council, as well as NASA's Astrobiology Virtual Planetary Laboratory, Planetary Geology and Geophysics, Lunar Science Institute and Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute programs.
"A late moon-forming event, as suggested by our work, is very consistent with an identical Earth and moon," Jacobson said according to Space.com. "Older disks tend to be dynamically more active, since there are fewer bodies left in the disk to distribute energy amongst."
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