The Moon Might be Older Than We Previously Thought

Scientists have a collection of Moon rocks, which they can measure the age of.

The oldest rocks are all about 4.35 billion years old, which is roughly 200 million years after the birth of the solar system.

The Moon would have raised gigantic tides on the early Earth , which itself was mostly molten and spinning rapidly.

These tides took energy from the Earth ’s spin and transferred some to the Moon ’s orbit, slowly pushing the Moon away from Earth .

This motion continues today .

Very often in Earth and planetary sciences, geochemists and geophysicists end up with different and contradictory hypotheses. This happens partly because these fields use different kinds of measurements, but also because they speak very different scientific languages. Overcoming this language barrier is hard. Our study is an example of how sometimes bridging that linguistic and scientific divide can benefit researchers on both sides. This article was originally published on The Conversation by Francis Nimmo at University of California . Read the original article here..