![]() ![]() However, the researchers will have to examine rock and dust samples excavated from deep beneath the Moon's surface – an objective of NASA's future Artemis missions – before they can confirm how mixed its mantle could be. The higher-resolution simulation left the researchers with a Moon which formed in a matter of hours from the ejected chunks of Earth and the shattered pieces of Theia, offering single-stage formation theory that offered a clean and elegant answer to the Moon's visible properties, such as its wide, tilted orbit its partially molten interior and its thin crust. But with a few thousand or million, then you might start to get it crumpling and breaking in a more realistic way." "You might imagine that if you build a model car out of toy blocks to simulate how the car might break in a crash, then if you use only a few dozen blocks, it might just split perfectly down the middle. "Secondly, perhaps even more importantly, using too low a resolution in a simulation can give you misleading or even simply wrong answers," he added. ![]() According to Kegerreis, for gigantic impacts the standard simulation resolution is usually between 100,000 and 1 million particles, but in the new study, he and his fellow researchers were able to model up to 100 million particles. Resolutions in these simulations are set by the number of particles the simulation uses. To investigate different possible scenarios for Moon formation following the collision, the new study's authors turned to a computer program called SPH With Inter-dependent Fine-grained Tasking (SWIFT), which is designed to closely simulate the complex and ever-changing web of gravitational and hydrodynamic forces that act upon large amounts of matter.ĭoing so accurately is no simple computational task, so the scientists used a supercomputer to run the program: a system nicknamed COSMA (short for "cosmology machine") at Durham University's Distributed Research Utilising Advanced Computing facility (DiRAC).īy using COSMA to simulate hundreds of Earth-Theia collisions with different angles, spins, and speeds, the lunar sleuths were able to model the aftermath of the astronomical crack-up at higher resolutions than ever before. ![]()
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