The moon is younger than previously thought: Planetologists from Berlin and Münster

Magma ocean and first rocky crust on the Moon © NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center The Moon formed a little later than previously assumed. When a Mars-sized protoplanet was destroyed in a collision with the young Earth, a new body was created from the debris ejected during this catastrophe - the Moon. Planetologists at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luftund Raumfahrt; DLR) and the University of Münster have used a new numerical model to reconstruct the time at which the event occurred - 4.425 billion years ago. The previous assumptions about the formation of the Moon were based on an age of 4.51 billion years - that, is 85 million years earlier than the new calculations reveal. "This is the first time that the age of the Moon can be directly linked to an event that occurred at the very end of the Earth's formation, namely the formation of the core," says Thorsten Kleine from the Institute of Planetology at Münster University. The study has been published in the scientific journal "Science Advances". Background and methods: Four-and-a-half billion years ago, the Solar System was still a rather chaotic place.