Freaky Theory Offers Totally New Explanation of the Moon’s Origin

A favorite pastime of astronomers is to debate the origin of Earth’s Moon, but despite decades of research, they don’t seem to be any closer to reaching a consensus. Scientists have now added a new theory to mix—and it’s weird as hell. The Moon, they argue, formed inside a gigantic donut-shaped cloud of vaporized rock that would eventually condense into the Earth.

The Moon, it has been argued, was captured by the Earth’s gravity billions of years ago. Alternately, the Earth and Moon formed together as a binary system within the Sun’s protoplanetary disk. Or, a rapidly spinning Earth, in an example of cosmological-scale fission, ejected a huge blob of its mass, producing the Moon.