How did the moon come into existence? For a really long time since the dawn of civilization researcher and thinkers have been trying to answer this question.
A commonly used but unestablished answer to this question is thatthe Moon was framed billions of years back when a Mars-sized planet called Theia crashed into the Earth, severing a huge lump from the planet at the time.
Presently, some researchers from New Mexico are now claiming to have data which supports this claim.
Something that seems to dispute this claim is that the the oxygen isotopes in lunar rocks that were collected during the Apollo mission to the moon bear no similarities those found on rocks in and other objects in other parts of the solar system, even though the said oxygen isotopes share similarities with the ones found on Earth.
So how were they able to support the claim that the Moon is made up of some parts of Thiea.
An hypothesis is that there is a very small possibility that Earth and Theia were strucutred similarly such that it was possible for Earth and Theia to become enmeshed together in an untraceable way.
In their examination, the New Mexico researchers inspected oxygen isotopes in a number of different types of lunar rocks, gathered from an assortment of elevations.
They found a direct correlation between the depth of the origin of the rock and how heavy the oxygen isotopes were.
"Obviously, Theia's particular oxygen isotope organization was not totally lost through homogenisation during the impact," the analysts wrote in their paper.
That implies the oxygen isotopes didn't completely blend during the Theia-Earth sway, prompting their decision that Theia could've still started from outside of the Solar System before affecting with Earth.