THE CRASH THAT MADE OUR MOON

It’s the brightest thing in our night sky. Over the course of history it has been revered as a god, trampled across by 12 men and immortalised in poetry. The Moon is our steadfast companion, our only natural satellite as we endlessly orbit the Sun. Yet for an object that has received such scrutiny, arguments rage about where exactly the Moon came from. A suitable explanation needs to take into account what is perhaps the Moon’s greatest oddity: its size. It is the fifth-largest moon in the Solar System, trumping most of the satellites of our much bigger planetary neighbours. If you compare the size of moons to the size of their host planet, ours comes out at the very top. Many of the smaller moons of the Solar System are thought to be captured worlds – bodies that wandered too close to a planet before getting snared in its gravitational pull. Given the size of our Moon, it’s hard to imagine that’s how it ended