Hunt for the Moon's parent
After musing on the Moon's creation only last week, news has come through that we could be close to discovering how it came to be.
It is thought our lunar companion was formed when a Mars-sized planet hit the Earth. Debris from this big bang then got together to make what we see in the sky most nights.
Two identical spacecraft are on the lookout for evidence of what's left of the mystery planet - nicknamed Theia by astronomers.
The duo, called Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (Stereo), is having a gander at areas in space which could well contain remnants of Theia.
First up for Stereo are two Lagrange points - areas where the sun's and Earth's gravity cancel each other out. Over time, asteroids and the like can end up in these 'wells', kept in a steady orbit.
The ancient crunch would have happened when both planets were molten, with heavier elements like iron sinking to the centre of both. When they hit the outer layers, made up of lighter elements, were stripped away and formed a new world.
This would explain why there's a puzzling lack of iron on the Moon.
So Stereo has their eyes pealed for a sad-looking lump of iron. A planet that never was.
Weird Science Factoid: Babies are always born with blue eyes. If yours has glowing red eyes, you might want to worry.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
